Jason Segel is setting the record straight: He ended up on Shrinking because of his jovial walk. 

Segel, known for starring in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and How I Met Your Mother, now lives in a small town in California, where he was spotted by a friend of Bill Lawrence’s while taking a walk. That’s when Lawrence decided to call him about an idea he was working on for a new show with fellow Ted Lasso writer Brett Goldstein. 

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Shrinking, which debuted on Apple TV+ in January, is a charming dark comedy about a therapist named Jimmy (Segel) who is grappling with grief after the death of his wife, while also trying to help his own patients with a myriad of issues and hang-ups. Segel, who also serves as a writer and executive producer on the series, plays Jimmy with an authenticity and a charm that allows audiences to forgive him (and sometimes laugh at him), even as he stumbles through his grief.  

Segel has been cautious about stepping back into TV after spending almost a decade in the medium so early in his career, but he tells Little Gold Men that Shrinking has allowed him to dive into a more emotional and dramatic place—a place he feels very much at home. “I think this is maybe a defect that I’ve used for artistic purposes: I feel things 1.5 times the amount that is the right size,” he says. “Joy feels so joyful but pain feels very painful, and it’s all just a little much, the way I’m going through it. So it makes it very easy to perform those things, because a lot of times 10% too much is a pretty good area for acting.”

Vanity Fair: From what I understand, Brett Goldstein and Bill Lawrence came to you with this idea. What was their pitch to you?

Jason Segel: I got a cold call from Bill Lawrence, about maybe a year and a half ago, and he said, “Hey, I'm trying to figure out what my next show is. You wanna try to do something together?”

You didn’t know him at the time?

I had met him once at a dinner party, like 10 years ago. Life is so weird. He lied to me and said, “Oh, you’ve been on my mind. I've been watching your work. I like your stuff.” The real reason it turns out is his producing partner, Jeff [Ingold] was in the small town that I live in. I take these long, meandering walks where I'm listening to music. I was probably listening to, like, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” kind of dancing around. Apparently Jeff saw me and texted Bill, “Hey, just saw Jason Segel. He seems like a happy guy. We should work with him.” So that’s, that’s the real truth of how this stuff goes down.

How funny. 

We started sharing ideas back and forth and. Nothing was quite right, especially because my target was pretty narrow if I was going to do TV again. I was on a sitcom for like a decade—and I feel very grateful and lucky. It was a dream job and it changed my life, but it is very repetitive. I think by nature of a sitcom too, the point is that it's repetitive. You're supposed to be able to check in in any episode when it's in syndication and things stay pretty similar episode by episode. That was okay in my 20s, but I’m in my 40s now and I'm more aware of time and how this stuff ends. 

He and Brett pitched me this idea about a shrink who was grieving himself and basically going through a nervous breakdown while he continued to practice therapy. There would be this kind of even mix of big comedy and set comedy pieces, but also real pathos and we were gonna handle the grieving as honestly as possible. That seemed like this really tasty mix of everything I was looking for.

Jimmy is grieving the loss of his wife, and he does some stuff that could make him very unlikeable, but you continue to root for him. I don't know if it's just because you're so apparently such a happy guy, and charming that it works so well?

I’ll be personal with you: I don't wake up happy. I wake up having to do a lot of work to get to happy and me taking long meandering walks, listening to “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” is less the expression of a happy-go-lucky guy and more someone who's working pretty hard to get to zero. Part of the idea of building the character of someone who outwardly had to appear like he had it together because he's practicing therapy on people who need him, but privately was having a very different emotional experience. In terms of acting, one of the things that I'm aware of is that, for whatever reason, I don't know if it's the shape of my face or because I played your best friend for a million years.

Or working on The Muppets, the most lovable characters in the world?

You're right. I guess I should own it a little. I'm lovable. But I seem to have built up some currency and we had this discussion of like, “let's spend it.” I think that this show is the most interesting if you start somebody at true rock bottom and watch him pull his way out, and rock bottom is messy, rock bottom is sloppy and scrambly, and you do regrettable things and you have to build your way back. So we had a talk of like, “Hey guys, I think I can pull it off, like make him wrong, have him be doing a bunch of stuff that is pushing the limit of likability and let me crawl my way out of it.”I think it worked.

Obviously, having Harrison Ford in your cast is a pretty big deal. How did he surprise you as a scene partner?

You have this idea when you work with someone who has worked so much and is so good at what they do that perhaps they have their bag of tricks and you're just going to get variations on a theme of what has worked for a long, long time. And I've been around that. Weirdly, Harrison's gotten a chance to be wry, but he hasn't had to do big comedy. He hasn't had to do moves, you know? And so at first all we could imagine was like, we will do comedy around Harrison Ford and he'll be gruff, and that’s what it is at the beginning of the season. And then at some point, like Jessica [Williams] and I are riffing and I just noticed this look in Harrison's eye of glee and competitiveness, and then all of a sudden you see Harrison start to jump into the ring. And this dude is funny, like he's present and alive. 

You talk about Harrison being such a veteran, but the reality is you were on your first major show when you were 19. How has having that kind of experience influenced the choices you make even now?

I had a big existential crisis when How I Met Your Mother ended, about my relationship to work because at some point I was like, really winning work. I had this little period where I could do anything I wanted. And I was very unhappy, and I couldn't figure out why. So when How I Met Your Mother ended, I spent a long time, like five years, trying to figure out my relationship to work in a way that would be sustainable for me and interesting for me. It can be a bit of an abusive relationship too because when it loves you, it loves you so much and it feels just like love. But then when it turns on you, it's kinda absent and then it comes back and I just can't quit you acting, you know? 

So in that period when I was trying to figure it out, I only took projects where I could be around people I really admired, so I could ask them a lot of questions. Because I read this crazy interview between Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant, where Michael Jackson basically told Kobe Bryant, “when you are around people you admire, do not be a fan, be an interviewer. Ask them every question that you feel like will be a helpful tool for your journey.” So I asked one friend, “what is art?” He said, “art is performing an act of self-exploration, on behalf of an audience,” which resonates with my style of acting. It's like what Kermit the Frog does, or Tom Hanks or Jimmy Stewart, this kind of surrogate style acting. So now I choose things where for the next however long this project is, it's my job to go through something on film, and in this one it's grief.

You're a pretty prolific writer. You’ve written books plus all these screenplays. Was the goal to always do both acting and writing?

I would love a life where I just got offered awesome acting roles, and I just did that. I find acting so peaceful. You're with your other actors, and then your job is just to be present. Like the wave is in charge when you're acting, when you're writing it is just this constant exercise in self-loathing. You have this idea that excites you and then you're like, “oh no, it doesn't exist, and now I have to make it exist.” But for me, it's kind of been the only way that I can play the parts I want.

Shrinking has been renewed for a second season. Where are you in the process right now?

We're on strike. We're on this sort of indefinite hold as they figure out some really, really important stuff.

Where were you at when the last strike was happening back in 2007?

On How I Met Your Mother, I remember it being really awkward because we had some scripts banked, and so we shot for a little while through the strike and it was a very unpleasant and painful thing to pass my writers on the way to set. And I was very happy when we ran out of scripts.