Spending a decade in the How I Met Your Mother role might’ve frustrated Jason Segel, but it saved him at a low point in his career
Jason Segel was just 18 when he landed the gig in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. He revealed that he didn’t go to college to film the show. When it was canceled, Judd Apatow tried his best to help him out. However, the period after the 1999 series was a dark time for the actor and he almost considered quitting the industry during this depressed state.
However, it was the CBS series, How I Met Your Mother, which saved him from descending into madness. The show ran from 2005 to 2014, giving him a day job when he was struggling. During this time, he also landed some film roles, including Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, that further heightened his career prospects.
How I Met Your Mother Brought Jason Segel Out Of His ‘Cave of Depression’
After Freaks and Geeks got canceled, Judd Apatow took Jason Segel and Seth Rogen under his wings and mentored them to write scripts. Segel revealed during a 2010 interview that Apatow taught them everything about preparing an outline, how to write a beat sheet, and how to draft a script. Learning from the director, Segel wrote and sold his first script when he was just 21.
However, he added that the script did not get picked up for a movie. He had a rough time in acting too, since producers deemed him too big to play a kid and too young to play an adult. He had made enough money to keep things afloat from his Freaks and Geeks paycheck and from the script that he sold. However, after spending days writing scripts, things got pretty dark for him.
