Jason Segel Says He Was 'Really Unhappy' During Final 'HIMYM' Seasons
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Jason Segel is getting candid about the part of How I Met Your Mother that fans didn't get to see.
The 43-year-old actor starred as fan-favorite character Marshall Eriksen on the popular sitcom from 2005 to 2014, but while he was making viewers at home laugh, he was also going through some of his own personal struggles.
During The Hollywood Reporter's Comedy Actor Roundtable, Segel opened up about feeling uninspired by a lack of creative freedom, despite the growing success of his career at the time.
"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," the Shrinking star stated. "And I was really unhappy."
During the later years of filming the CBS series, Segel was also starring in roles including The Muppets, Sex Tape, The Five-Year Engagement and This Is 40.
"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 shit [what you want to do].' Like, 'Good for you, man.'"
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"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," Segel remembered. "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 continued, "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. 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."
HIMYM—which also starred Josh Radnor, Alyson Hannigan, Neil Patrick Harris and Cobie Smulders—aired its final season in 2014. A spinoff series, How I Met Your Father, featuring Hilary Duff, Kim Cattrall, and Francia Raisa, has since been created and is currently airing its third season on Hulu.
