- Jason Segel told The Hollywood Reporter that he was "unhappy" at the height of his career
- The actor starred as Marshall Eriksen from 2005 to 2014 in the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother."
Jason Segel now says that despite the success of "How I Met Your Mother," he felt far from fulfilled.
During a recent Hollywood Reporter comedy actors roundtable, Segel, who's currently starring in the Apple TV+ show "Shrinking," admitted that despite parlaying the sitcom into starring roles in films like "This Is 40," "The Muppets," and "Get Him To The Greek," he was "really unhappy" toward the end of the show.
"There was a period in my life and career around the last couple years of 'How I Met Your Mother' where things were firing on both movies and TV and everyone was telling me how well it was going and I was really unhappy," Segel said. "And so I then had to grapple with like, why, what's off about this equation? Because I should be feeling like I did it."
Ultimately, Segel said, he had to learn to strike a balance between fighting to make his own creative choices and knowing when to give up the ghost.
"I think the thing that I was confronted with is that it's really great to make the decision of, 'fuck 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],'" he told the magazine.
He used the famous ending of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" as an example.
"I had to fight hard to put a Dracula puppet musical at the end of a movie," he said, likening his efforts to make the scene happen to a months- or years-long process of pushing a boulder up a hill.
"It's tricky. Part of the equation is getting to the point where you ask yourself, 'What is worth trading my time for? What am I going to give over nine months or three years for?'"
When "How I Met Your Mother" wrapped in 2014 after nine seasons, Segel was left reeling. He described the feeling to Vanity Fair in May 2023 as an "existential crisis."
"When How I Met Your Mother ended, I spent a long time, like five years, trying to figure out my relationship to work in a way that would be sustainable for me and interesting for me," he told VF. "It can be a bit of an abusive relationship too because when it loves you, it loves you so much and it feels just like love. But then when it turns on you, it's kinda absent and then it comes back and I just can't quit you acting, you know?"