‘Awards Chatter’ Live Pod: Jason Segel on ‘Shrinking,’ the “Existential Crisis” From Which It Came and His Odds-Defying Career

Jason Segel, the guest on the latest episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast — which was recorded in front of an audience at the inaugural Napa Valley StreamFest, where he was celebrated with the fest’s TV Performance of the Year Award — is only 45, but he has already been a major figure in the American comedy scene for a quarter-century.

Segel made his name on the short-lived but seminal TV series Freaks and Geeks (1999); in hit films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), I Love You, Man (2009) and The Muppets (2011); and over the course of nine seasons on the popular hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother, spanning 2005 through 2014. But a little over a decade ago, in the midst of what he now describes as an “existential crisis,” he rebooted his career.

A different side of Segel first began to emerge in the 2011 dark dramedy Jeff, Who Lives at Home, from the brothers Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass. It was further amplified in the 2015 two-hander The End of the Tour, in which he masterfully portrayed the writer David Foster Wallace, and on the HBO drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022-23), on which he played former Lakers coach Paul Westhead.

But it has been most evident via the acclaimed Apple TV+ comedy series Shrinking, which Segel co-created with Ted Lasso’s Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, and on which he stars as Jimmy, a grieving widower, father of a teenage girl and cognitive behavioral therapist (whose fellow therapists are played by Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams).

Over the course of this episode of Awards Chatter, Segel — who previously appeared on the pod’s third episode, back in 2015 — opened up about his odds-defying path to an acting career; how his mentor Apatow convinced him to write his own material rather than wait for someone else to write for him; what may have triggered his existential crisis, and how he navigated his way out of it; and how, with Shrinking, he and his collaborators figured out how to make a funny TV show about grief (season one, which clocked in at 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and forgiveness (season two, which stands at an even more impressive 97 percent).