These days, actor Jason Segel is just as likely to walk through a row of orange trees in overalls as he is to be at a Hollywood premiere in an Armani suit.
The 44-year-old “How I Met Your Mother” star opened up this week about why he packed up and moved to a “small country town” at the height of his success in the industry.
“I was having a really roaring 20s. I had ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ and I was also writing a bunch of movies that were successful and doing well. But I wasn’t doing a lot of personal check-ins because I was so busy,” Segel told Hoda Kotb on the “Today” show Wednesday.
“You know, I was working pretty much every day of the year, doing ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ writing a movie during that year, and then shooting it during the break, going back to ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ And I realized that art is supposed to be a reflection of what you’re going through, and I actually wasn’t going through much lifewise.”
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Jason Segel moved to a small town after “How I Met Your Mother” ended. (Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images)
Segel said he realized he was 33 years old and still writing movies about “being afraid of girls. You know what I mean? I’m like a grown man. I’m a successful grown man. I’m not afraid of girls anymore, and so I moved out of LA. I moved to a little country town, and I started to ask myself questions like, ‘What do you actually like? What are you actually thinking about right now? Who do you want to be as a performer and artist?’”
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He said he began to write different stories, joking that “it’s like the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, where it all makes sense that” his new show “Shrinking,” with Harrison Ford, in which he plays a grieving therapist, “is the culmination of, ‘Oh, I care about dramatic themes and exploring those things, and I’m also good at comedy. How do I reconcile those?’”
Jason Segel with the cast of “How I Met Your Mother.” (NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
Segel elaborated on the “little farm town” he moved to in a 2022 interview with Jimmy Kimmel in which he joked he has “a lot of oranges, and I have a lot of overalls,” adding he owns around 21 acres of orange groves.
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While he said he “sometimes” misses the city, “I really like being in a small town. Like, I go to the high school football games and stuff and eat a sandwich, which I didn’t know if you could do without kids, but you can.
“And I go to the Christmas play in town, and I wait outside and I ask the little kids to sign my playbill,” he added. “It’s really fun. I love it.”
Harrison Ford stars with Jason Segel in “Shrinking.” (Monica Schipper/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images)
When Kimmel asked if the kids “lose their minds” over a famous star asking for their autograph, he joked, “They don’t know who I am.”
Segel said he moved there when “How I Met Your Mother” ended around 10 years ago. “I was like ‘Oh, I can do whatever I want now, and I’m going to go live in this town. And I never left.”
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He said in LA he was always a little afraid to walk around because of the paparazzi, “and there I really like just walk around like Big Bird,” he joked, doing an exaggerated wave. “‘Hey, everybody!’ And to the kids I’m like Muppet guy and to the grownups I’m like a guy from ‘Sarah Marshall.’ It’s a great mix.”