In 'Shrinking,' Jason Segel does the work

Jason Segel knows that you like him.

It’s the sad eyes. The pained smile. The shambling 6-foot-4-inch frame that he diminishes by caving in his chest. It’s his single season on the critics’ darling Freaks and Geeks, playing a puppyish high schooler; his nine seasons on the audience favourite How I Met Your Mother, as a loving, excitable husband and dad; his slate of rom-coms. If you saw the 2008 film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which he also wrote, you spent 73 frames opposite his exposed body during a mortifying breakup scene. And, most likely, you came out still liking him.

“I’ve built up some currency, some good will,” Segel said. “Like, ‘Oh, he’s a good guy; he wouldn’t do anything intentionally mean.’” This was on a January video call, and Segel was recounting an early conversation he’d had with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein about their Apple TV+ sitcom Shrinking. The first two episodes premiered on January 27; eight more follow weekly.

Segel, 43, who joined the series as a writer, executive producer and star, opposite Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, plays Jimmy, a cognitive behavioral therapist crushed by personal grief. A year after the sudden death of his wife, Jimmy self-medicates with pills, booze and some very polite sex workers. He is a neglectful father and a bad neighbour. His approach to patient care would make an ethics panel weep. Another comic actor might have tried to protect his likability. Segel, in this role, wanted to squander it.

“We have to use that for evil,” he recalled telling Lawrence and Goldstein. “We should spend that currency.”

From basketball player to actor

Segel, who grew up in a comfortable, beach-adjacent neighborhood of Los Angeles, became a professional actor by inclination and deceit. He was an anxious kid, burdened from an early age, he said, by “a sense of impending doom.” Acting classes were a rare space in which he felt comfortable. By high school, though, his basketball schedule (he was, as his height suggests, a star) kept him from auditioning for most school plays. His theater teacher persuaded him to star in a three-night run of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. Without telling Segel, that teacher invited a leading casting director from Paramount, who liked what she saw.

“I’m baffled by people who take the bus to LA and say, ‘I’m gonna make it,’” Segel said, moving his thickly stubbled face closer to the camera. He wore a grey plaid shirt, his brown hair cresting high above his forehead, a wave that never broke. “That’s bravery. Me, I got really lucky.”

He landed a role on Freaks and Geeks not long after. Precocious, he had a quarter-life crisis at 20, when that series ended after 18 episodes. He was too old and too tall to play more high schoolers and too young for anything else. Judd Apatow, the executive producer of Freaks and Geeks, encouraged him to write. A few years later, just after he was cast in How I Met Your Mother, he had begun Sarah Marshall.

Nicholas Stoller, who directed that movie, admired the script’s sweetness and Segel’s sweetness, too. The character Segel played, like many he had played and would play, verged on creepy and pathetic without tumbling over. “He’s willing to have his characters do bad stuff because it’s human, it’s relatable,” Stoller said. “But he just grounds it in kindness.”

That movie set the template for the next six years: Film the sitcom for eight months and then make a movie during the hiatus, often one that he had written or co-written. But when How I Met Your Mother ended in 2014, Segel, then 34 and still precocious, had his midlife crisis. This one felt more existential. He’d been acting for half of his life and figured he was good at it. And he’d written films he was proud of, like Sarah Marshall and the 2011 Muppets movie. But was this his purpose? Writing and delivering joke after joke after joke?

Inspired to write again

Segel explored the alternatives. Newly sober, he left Los Angeles, moving several hours north, to a property with orange groves. He chose projects more sparingly. To begin, he signed on to star in The End of the Tour, a movie about writer David Foster Wallace. He hadn’t really done a drama since The Zoo Story. But he recognized parallels between himself and the film’s version of Wallace, who has just published his masterwork, Infinite Jest.

“It’s this moment where everyone is saying, ‘You’ve won life,’” Segel said. “And you are feeling so scared. Like, Oh, no. What’s next?”

He didn’t know. He wasn’t writing, and he didn’t find anything funny. But maybe he just didn’t want to write comedy, he realized, which led him to create Dispatches from Elsewhere, a 2020 limited series about four adrift souls ensnared by an alternative reality game.

“While it wasn’t the most commercial thing I’ve ever written, it was maybe the most meaningful,” Segel said. “I proved I could make something again.” He began to theorize that maybe he needed to make work that let him use more of himself — the comedy stuff and the not-so-comic stuff. He sought projects that encouraged him to be what a therapist might describe as “integrated.”

“Like, let’s make this one weird guy,” he said. “That’s maybe what the point of all of this has been about.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.