Why Jason Segel Was ‘Scared’ in Wake of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Ending

It’s been almost 10 years since How I Met Your Mother after nine seasons, and fans finally met the infamous “Mother,” but Jason Segel apparently felt scared after the series wrapped. The actor, who portrayed Marshall Eriksen for the entirety of the CBS sitcom’s run, opened up to People about life after HIMYM. Like many actors who finish a lengthy project, he didn’t know what to do.

“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,” Segel 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.”

Switching from comedy to drama so quickly after doing comedy for close to ten years is a big change. He admitted to being scared because he didn’t know if he was good enough to do the difficult genre, but he channeled a pretty great actor and worked hard at it, despite his fears.

“I also had no system of prep because you prep differently for comedy,” Segel shared. “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.”

The End of Tour, which released in 2015, seemed to have been a pretty great film for Jason Segel, considering he’s done a decent amount of drama films since then and even starred in the 2022 crime thriller Windfall, where he also served as a story writer and producer. So while he was scared about branching out into different genres, it’s clear that he’s done better than he thought he would. 

While doing different genres simultaneously sounds scary, if Segel can flawlessly do it, it all takes some hard work and practice. He doesn’t seem to be slowing down on the drama front any time soon, and it’s going to be exciting to see what his next project is, in either drama or comedy.