Jason Segel Was ‘Really Unhappy’ Filming The End Of ‘How I Met Your Mother’
Jason Segel is opening up about why he was “really unhappy” towards the end of filming the popular sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. During The Hollywood Reporter’s Comedy Actor Roundtable, the Shrinking star chalked up his feeling of unhappiness to a lack of creative freedom. Despite his success in television and film, Segel said that in “the last couple of years” of filming How I Met Your Mother, he had to “grapple with why? What’s off about this equation?”
The actor, 43, admitted that though”it’s really great to make the decision of ‘f— it, I do what I want,'” there is a “system of permission in place.” He said that the people in charge will say things like, “‘We don’t give a s— [what you want to do].’ Like, ‘Good for you, man.'”
What Would Norton Do?
During the round table, the actor also opened up about wanting to expand his horizons in other genres following the sitcom’s series finale in 2014. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do next,” Segel recalled. “I really wondered if I was actually good enough to do drama. I took a movie called The End of the Tour to play David Foster Wallace. The degree of difficulty of it not looking like a Saturday Night Live sketch, when you get the glasses and the bandanna, and you’re saying the lines, felt so high.”
He compared the differences in preparing for the role, as it was completely different from comedy. “There was a lot of improv in how we came up, and these were big chunks of dialogue,” he said. “I literally just played in my head, ‘What would Edward Norton do?’ I got a dialect coach, and I did all these things that I heard you do if you’re a real actor. But man, I was scared.”
Forever Connected To How I Met Your Mother
Despite moving on from How I Met Your Mother, Segel shared in January that he would be open to reprising his role as Marshall Eriksen on the show’s spinoff, How I Met Your Father. He told ET that he would “do anything” for the show’s creators, adding, “Those people changed my life, and I would do anything they ever asked me to.”
