Jason Segel was “really unhappy” during the final seasons of ‘How I Met Your Mother’.
Jason Segel ‘actually sad’ during final seasons of How I Met Your Mother
The 43-year-old actor – who performed Marshall Eriksen on the long-running CBS sitcom – revealed that regardless of his success in tv and movie, he felt that he had an absence of artistic freedom.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Jason defined: “There was a interval in my life and profession across the final couple of years of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ the place issues had been firing in each motion pictures and TV, and everybody was telling me how nicely it was going. And I was actually sad.
“I then had to grapple with why? What’s off about this equation? I think the thing that I was confronted with is that it’s really great to make the decision of ‘f*** 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*** [what you want to do].’ Like, ‘Good for you, man.'”
Despite his success in each huge and small display comedy, Jason admitted he was insecure about his talents and fearful he couldn’t do drama.
He mentioned: “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. 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.”
“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.”
