“I wondered if I was good enough”: the role that convinced Jason Segel his career wasn’t a dead-end
There are two massive pros and cons when it comes to watching the very funny 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and those are that 1: Jason Segel is brilliant in it and performs a vampire musical with muppets, and 2: Russell Brand is in it.
These days, despite some fantastic turns from Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd (“You sound like you’re from Landan!”) and Kristen Bell, it’s a bit tough to sit through it due to the presence of Brand, who for a mystifying three year period between 2008 and 2011 was suddenly the darling of Hollywood, meaning you can’t even watch a cute drumming rabbit in Hop at Easter without listening to his creepy messianic pseudo-intellectual faux-cockney bollocks.
But back to Segel, for whom Forgetting Sarah Marshall is really a showcase of his considerable talents, and who wrote the movie as well as playing the lead character. It was a big hit around the world, and while he was well known in the US due to his sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which had run since 2005, it was likely the first time most people outside America had come across him.
While it was hugely successful and led to more hit comedy movies like Bad Teacher with Cameron Diaz, I Love You Man, again with Paul Rudd, and a Muppets reboot that Segel co-wrote with Jim Henson, he still had another few years of the sitcom still to make, and it finally finished after nine years, leaving him questioning the next phase of his career.
He told The Hollywood Reporter, “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. 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.”
Foster Wallace was an American writer plagued with depression, best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which has become something of a bible for disaffected men in their 30s – A24’s The End of the Tour is based on the memoir of another author, David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who took a five-day road trip with Wallace around the time Infinite Jest was released.
Wallace was distinctive with his bandana, long hair and glasses, and Segel received considerable praise for his portrayal of the late writer in the movie, which grossed around $3million at the box office, a reasonable amount for a film with such a niche subject matter, with Segel admitting that his sole inspiration for how to approach the switch from a career doing comedy to drama was that he simply thought about what Edward Norton would do.
The last few years or so, Segel has also been winning plaudits for Shrinking, the Apple TV comedy that he co-created with Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein and Bill Lawrence and for which he has been Golden Globe nominated twice in 2024 and 2025.
He’ll be doing a fourth season of that show as well as appearing in a new comedy opposite Angelina Jolie called Anxious People, about a group of wealthy people taken hostage in a house over Christmas.
