Jason Segel has recently revealed he faced resistance from the entertainment industry when he took a break from comedy.
“It was like a decade of being on one show and doing a bunch of romantic comedies and stuff, I decided I wanted to see if I was good at dramas, and so I, like, dove in hard,” said the How I Met Your Mother star during THR’s Comedy Actor Roundtable.
Jason remarked, “I thought, ‘Look out world. Here comes me doing drama.’ And it turns out nobody cares.”
The Bad Teacher actor turned to drama genre as he did one 2015 movie, The End of the Tour, which earned Jason excellent reviews.
At the time, the Shrinking actor noted, “I wanted to do something different. I needed to make a change.”
“If I’m going to do this for 50 more years, it has to be reflective of what I’m feeling,” stated the 45-year-old.
Reflecting on the experience, Jason explained, “Nobody saw [the movie], but I felt like, ‘You can do it.’ And so that was important for me, because I didn’t want to be the guy who sat his whole life wondering if he could do something.”
Meanwhile, Jason found a balance between comedy and drama and that’s what he most responds to in his projects.
The actor called James L. Brooks “the king” of this approach, noting that his movies made clear that “life is complicated”.
“There aren’t heroes and villains, and you cry through the funny stuff and laugh through the tough stuff,” he further said.