‘How I Met Your Mother’ Star Jason Segel Has Explained Why He Hasn’t Starred In A Comedy In Years

Between 2008 and 2014, Jason Segel starred in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I Love You, Man, Gulliver’s Travels, Bad Teacher, The Five-Year Engagement, and Sex Tape, many of which were box office hits; wrote The Muppets; and continued to play Marshall Eriksen on the hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Not a bad seven years. However, in the seven years since, Segel hasn’t appeared in a single comedy. He’s done fine work in The End of the Tour, as David Foster Wallace, and AMC’s Dispatches from Elsewhere, which he also created, but what happened to the lovable Dracula musical guy?

“I did about a decade and a half of pure comedy, between those movies and then How I Met Your Mother, which was literally every day for nine years,” Segel told Yahoo! Entertainment. “I think I was just interested in seeing what else I could do.” He added:

Sex Tape ended up doing well, I think, but it didn’t feel good. So I got to look forward and say, ‘This is freedom. You can do anything right now. So why don’t we walk right into some of the looming questions, like, what if I tried to do just a drama? What if I tried to write and create and run a TV show?’ I wanted to bump up against my litmus, which I hadn’t done in a long time.”

Segel is currently making the promotional rounds for Our Friend, a cancer drama co-starring Dakota Johnson and Casey Affleck (it’s out now), and he’s set to star in The Sky Is Everywhere from Madeline’s Madeline and Shirley director Josephine Decker. It’s interesting to see the Freaks and Geeks actor flex his creative muscle outside of comedies. That being said, if he wants to make another Muppets movie, I would not say no to watching.

(Via Yahoo! Entertainment)