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A difficult balance. Jason Segel reflected on his attempts to pursue other opportunities while filming the final seasons of How I Met Your Mother — and revealed how his mental health was affected.
“There was a period in my life and career around the last couple of years of How I Met Your Mother where things were firing in both movies and TV, and everyone was telling me how well it was going,” Segel, 43, shared during The Hollywood Reporter’s Comedy Actor Roundtable on Thursday, June 1. “And I was really unhappy.”
The actor, who played Marshall Eriksen in the hit sitcom from 2005 to 2014, said he struggled with not having full control of his career.
“I then had to grapple with why? What’s off about this equation?” he continued. “I think the thing that I was confronted with is that it’s really great to make the decision of ‘F—k it, I do what I want.’ But unfortunately, there’s a system of permission in place where people will go, ‘We don’t give a s—t [what you want to do].’ Like, ‘Good for you, man.’”
How I Met Your Mother followed Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and his group of friends in New York City as they attempted to find happiness in their personal and professional lives. In the series, an older version of Ted (voiced by the late Bob Saget) recalled his past to his son and daughter as a way to explain how he met their mother. The series also starred Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, Alyson Hannigan and Cristin Milioti
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As HIMYM went on to become an award-winning show, Segel explored other projects such as The Muppets, The Five-Year Engagement and This Is 40. According to the comedian, he faced many challenges while trying to branch out on the big screen.
“After How I Met Your Mother ended, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I really wondered if I was actually good enough to do drama,” he added on Thursday. “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.”
Segal noted that making the transition from comedy to drama wasn’t what he expected. “I also had no system of prep because you prep differently for 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.”
Since HIMYM aired its series finale, the show’s impact continued to grow with a spinoff titled How I Met Your Father. The Hulu series, which debuted in January 2022, focuses on Sophie (Hilary Duff) and her friends’ lives in Manhattan. In this gender-swapped version of the story, Future Sophie (Kim Cattrall) recounts to her son the events that led to her meeting his father.
Segal, for his part, previously hinted that he would be open to reprising his role as Marshall in support of executive producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, telling Entertainment Tonight in January, “Those people changed my life, and I would do anything they ever asked me to.”
