Yahoo News Jason Segel Admits He Was 'Really Unhappy' While Filming How I Met Your Mother's Later Seasons
Segel, who played Marshall Eriksen on the long-running CBS sitcom, admitted that he wondered "what's off about this equation" as his movie and television career skyrocketed
Jason Segel is opening up about why he was “really unhappy” during the later seasons of How I Met Your Mother.
During The Hollywood Reporter’s Comedy Actor Roundtable, the Shrinking star, 43, discussed feeling a lack of creative freedom despite his success in television and film.
"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," he shared. "And I was really unhappy."
Related: Jason Segel Says He's 'Always Struggled' with Anxiety: 'We're All a Mess'
"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--- 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.'"
During the final years of How I Met Your Mother, Segel, who played Marshall Eriksen on the CBS sitcom, was balancing starring roles in films including The Muppets, The Five-Year Engagement and This Is 40.
During the round table, the Sex Tape actor also opened up about wanting to expand his horizons and try his hand at drama following How I Met Your Mother's series finale in 2014.
Related: The Cast of 'How I Met Your Mother' : Where Are They Now?
"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," he recalled. "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," he added. "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."
Despite moving on from his part on the sitcom, Segel shared in January that he would be open to reprising his role on the show's spinoff How I Met Your Father.
The Winning Time actor told Entertainment Tonight that he would "do anything" for the Hulu spinoff's creators, adding, "Those people changed my life, and I would do anything they ever asked me to."
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How I Met Your Mother is now streaming in full on Hulu, and season 1 of Shrinking is available on Apple TV+
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