Jason Segel is known for comedies such as ‘Never Have Sex With Your Ex Again’ or the 2011 reboot ‘Muppets’ that he initiated. But above all, the 43-year-old is of course associated with the cult sitcom ‘How I Met Your Mother’. For nine seasons and as many years, Segel played the role of Marshall Eriksen, which earned him tons of fans and a hefty salary of $225,000 per episode. But that did not make the actor happy, he said during the annual Comedy Actor Emmy Roundtable cheated…
“During the final years of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ there was a period in my life and career when things were going well in both film and television. Everyone told me how well things were going, but I was really unhappy,” Jason Segel said in the interview, which also featured Tyler James Williams (“Everybody Hates Chris”), Steven Yeun (“BEEF”), Mo Amer (“Mo”) and stand-up comedian John Mulaney. The interviewer had previously asked all interview participants about the moment in their career when they thought: ‘I’m just going to do what I want now!’
“(…) I had to deal with the ‘why?’ get started with it,” says Segel. “What’s wrong with this comparison?! I think I was confronted with the fact that while it’s a great feeling to make the decision, ‘Fuck it, I’ll do what I want!’, unfortunately there is a consent system where people say, ‘We don’t consent ‘. shit what do you want to do!’”
Despite his position as a successful and popular sitcom actor, Jason Segel felt like he didn’t have enough creative freedom and that his ideas always fell on deaf ears. “All my ideas are often rejected by people who say, ‘No, that’s stupid,’” he said in the roundtable discussion.
“So you have to have the absolute will to say, ‘Okay, shit, I have an idea and I really believe in it, it won’t leave me alone, and now I’m going through all the approvals for three or four years and pushing Boulders moving slowly up the mountain.’ And then it happens that you carry the boulder to the top of the hill, but they still say no, and three years have passed.
This means you have to carefully consider what such a fight might actually be worth – and why it isn’t. Without going into details, the ‘Sex Tape’ star also admits that he had invested years in projects that he was no longer so convinced of afterwards.
But he also had opposite experiences: for example, the supposed risk of taking on his first dramatic role in the tragicomedy “The End Of The Tour” after the end of “How I Met Your Mother” (as writer David Foster Wallace) turned out to be to be true, an absolute stroke of luck – Segel not only received much critical acclaim for it, but also numerous nominations for various film awards. He recently starred alongside Jesse Plemons (“Killers Of The Flower Moon”) in the Netflix thriller “windfall“, based on one of his own ideas. So it looks like he’s doing better now!