‘How I Met Your Mother’ Almost Featured ‘American Pie’ Star Jason Biggs in Lead Role

Although Orange Is the New Black actor Jason Biggs was already a star in 2005 thanks to American Pie, he could have become an even bigger star if he also hadn’t made the “biggest regret” of his career. Biggs confirmed he was offered the lead role of Ted Mosby in CBS’ How I Met Your Mother, but he turned it down. Josh Radnor was cast instead and the show ran for nine seasons from 2005 to 2014.

“I was offered the role, yes,” Biggs said on SiriusXM’s The Covino & Rich Show Thursday, reports Page Six. “I was offered the role and it’s probably my biggest regret, you know, on passing.” The 42-year-old actor said he was at an “obnoxious” phase of his career when he was unsure if he wanted to do TV. He was still regularly making movies at the time, and enjoyed working “a couple of months on a gig” and then taking time off. At the time, it was also uncommon for movie stars to go back and forth between making movies and television, unlike in today’s Hollywood landscape.

“I passed on it and then, you know, two things happened very soon thereafter,” Biggs said Thursday. “One, that show blew up. We all know what happened with that show. And two, I was like, ‘I want to do TV!’” Four years later, he finally did get to work on TV when he was cast as Larry Bloom on Orange Is the New Black. He appeared in 22 episodes during the show’s run and has a Screen Actors Guild Award as a member of the cast.

Biggs said he had “no regrets” about the decisions he has made, but still wishes he could have played Ted Mosby. Surprisingly, Biggs later said he was not sure if HIMYM star Alison Hannigan knew he was offered the part. Hannigan played Lily on HIMYM and co-starred in American Pie with Biggs.

Biggs recently appeared on Fox’s The Masked Singer and starred in the short-lived Fox sitcom Outmatched with Maggie Lawson. His current project is also on Fox. He hosts the new Sunday night game show, Cherries Wild, where contestants have to get all the cherries in a giant slot machine to win $250,000. Episodes air Sundays at 7 p.m. ET.

As for HIMYM, the series starred Radnor as Ted, who tells his children how he met their mother 20 years earlier over the course of the series. The cast also included Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, and Hannigan, with Bob Sagat as the narrator. Creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas developed two different spin-offs titled How I Met Your Dad and How I Met Your Father, but neither of them worked out. HIMYM is available to stream on Hulu.