Cobie Smulders Communes With Sharks

She plays a deliciously coldblooded Ann Coulter in “Impeachment.”

A white shark nudged closer, gliding just above the actress Cobie Smulders, like a fan asking for a selfie. Ms. Smulders welcomed the intrusion. “This is cool,” she said, rapt, as the shark slid past in the waters of the New York Aquarium.

Ms. Smulders, adored for her nine seasons on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” has loved aquariums for as long as she can remember. As a mermaid-obsessed child in British Columbia, she visited the Vancouver aquarium often and spent weekends on her father’s sailboat, wondering about the life below the water’s surface. The University of Victoria accepted her to its marine biology program.

But a few months before school began, she fell in with some theater actors and deferred for a year. And then another year. And then another.