Jason Segel on Why He Left Hollywood for a “Little Country Town” Following ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Success
Jason Segel is opening up about his reason for leaving Hollywood following the success of How I Met Your Mother.
The actor made a recent appearance on the Today show, where Hoda Kotb brought up Segel’s decision to move out of Los Angeles once the CBS sitcom wrapped in 2014. “You did something so interesting,” she said. “A lot of people would’ve just taken a big dive into Hollywood, but you did something else. You pulled up stakes and moved away from all that. Why’d you do that?”
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“I was having a really roaring twenties,” the Shrinking star and co-creator responded. “I had How I Met Your Mother and I was also writing a bunch of movies that were successful and doing well.”
However, due to his busy work schedule with How I Met Your Mother and movies like 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Segel realized he wasn’t “doing a lot of personal check-ins.”
“I realized that art is supposed to be a reflection of what you’re going through and I actually wasn’t going through much life-wise,” he added. So that’s when he decided to change up his environment to hopefully create a sense of peace in his life.
“I moved out of L.A.,” Segel said. “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 an artist?’”
The This Is the End actor previously told the Los Angeles Times in June 2023 that he had moved to Ojai, California, a small town in Ventura County.
“Being there had the really interesting side-effect of realizing — after six weeks time, mind you — that, ‘Oh, my gosh. I finally feel calm,’” he said at the time. “And it occurred to me that when you’re doing this job and living in L.A., you’re never leaving campus.”
Segel continued, “So it was like this whole new experience to realize that when someone outside of Hollywood asks, ‘What are you up to?’ they mean, like, right now. So the answer is: ‘Oh. I’m on my way to the grocery store,’ not ‘I have three projects in development.’”
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