Jason Segel was just 18 when he landed the gig in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. He revealed that he didn’t go to college to film the show. When it was canceled, Judd Apatow tried his best to help him out. However, the period after the 1999 series was a dark time for the actor and he almost considered quitting the industry during this depressed state.
However, it was the CBS series, How I Met Your Mother, which saved him from descending into madness. The show ran from 2005 to 2014, giving him a day job when he was struggling. During this time, he also landed some film roles, including Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, that further heightened his career prospects.
How I Met Your Mother Brought Jason Segel Out Of His ‘Cave of Depression’
After Freaks and Geeks got canceled, Judd Apatow took Jason Segel and Seth Rogen under his wings and mentored them to write scripts. Segel revealed during a 2010 interview that Apatow taught them everything about preparing an outline, how to write a beat sheet, and how to draft a script. Learning from the director, Segel wrote and sold his first script when he was just 21.
However, he added that the script did not get picked up for a movie. He had a rough time in acting too, since producers deemed him too big to play a kid and too young to play an adult. He had made enough money to keep things afloat from his Freaks and Geeks paycheck and from the script that he sold. However, after spending days writing scripts, things got pretty dark for him.
By the age of 24, he was contemplating quitting the industry. It was at this time that the role of Marshall Eriksen in How I Met Your Mother came along. Segel called the sitcom a “godsend” that came just when he needed it. When asked if he worried about becoming the ‘sitcom guy’, Segel shared that he was just happy to be out of his cave of depression.
He shared that his writing went nowhere and he only came up with some bizarre scripts about weird kids and talking horses. He added that before the sitcom, he was going mad slowly. Segel shared with GQ:
One of the notes Judd always gives on scripts is “Too sitcom-y.” But initially I was just happy to be out of my cave of depression. I’d been writing really, really bizarre scripts. Weird kids’ movies about talking horses. I was slowly descending into madness.
Jason Segel shared that he felt good about himself again after he got the role of Marshall. He was happy that he was acting and working. He shared that he wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall during the first year of How I Met Your Mother. However, he did not shy away from making fun of the sitcom format of his show.
Jason Segel Was Critical Of One Aspect Of His HIMYM Role
During the interview, Jason Segel revealed the one downside of his role in How I Met Your Mother. He shared that he didn’t want to work a nine-to-five job when he became an actor, but his sitcom role was more like that regular job. At the time of the interview, he was eight years into the role. He shared:
But when you become an actor, part of it, the secret part of it, is that you don’t want to work a regular nine-to-five job. And the secret part of a TV show is that it’s a nine-to-five job. […] But when your idol is Peter Sellers, playing one character for eight years isn’t what you’re trying to do.
He further made fun of his role, sharing that he had nothing more to offer with Marshall Eriksen. He joked about how his character arc was a repeated sitcom trope. He shared:
It’s gonna be some iteration of, like, my TV wife opens the fridge, and she’s like, ‘What happened to the birthday cake?’ And I walk in with a little frosting here [points to corner of mouth] like, ‘What birthday cake?’
Segel was right to criticize his show, as it became progressively worse towards its final seasons. Most notably, the series had one of the most disappointing finales in the history of TV series.
How I Met Your Mother is now available for streaming on Netflix and Hulu.
