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I would like to wish Jason, his family and all the visitors of Jason Segel Source a very Happy New year! May 2011 be a happy, healthy and wonderful year to you all! Goodbye 2010, hello, 2011!

He’s the lovable goof Marshall on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother and is also the voice of a pint-sized super-villain with a shrink ray in Despicable Me. And now actor Jason Segel plays a ‘little guy’ in Jack Black’s latest film, Gulliver’s Travels. Excerpts from an interview…

How was it playing the main Liliputian in Jack Black’s film?
I’m in Jack’s pocket for a lot of it or standing on his shoulder or riding on his shoe. There were a lot of times when I was just acting to a tennis ball or something like that, but it was a really cool experience.

At 6’4, you’re this tall guy in real life, and the irony is not lost on many…
I tried really hard to put in a joke that I’m the tallest Liliputian, but it just didn’t translate. We’re all so little that a height difference of like 8 inches becomes literally millimeters when you’re looking at it in that scale. The joke didn’t translate unfortunately.

How much has How I Met Your Mother helped in getting you out there in the acting world?
It’s interesting, everything came together just at the right time. The first season of How I Met Your Mother was the same year I did Knocked Up, and season 2 was the year I did Sarah Marshall.Everything changed for me all at once. It’s a little hard for me to differentiate what did what, but everything came together really to be honest just when I needed it to. I was getting pretty close to feeling like it wasn’t going to pan out.

How close did you get?
I have no other discernable skills, so while mentally I might have gotten close, there really was a thought like, what was I going to do? I wasn’t going to go back to college at 26. I really didn’t have much to fall back on, so thank God it worked out.

What’re your future projects in hand?
I have co-written and also star in The Muppets, for which we are currently shooting too.

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Funnyman Jason Segel’s quirky humour is all thanks to his mother’s unorthodox parenting techniques – she had odd ways of punishing her young son. The Forgetting Sarah Marshall star’s mum would make her son watch depressing movies like Being There if he wanted to skip school and she once humiliated him after he was caught stealing a kiss from a classmate on a cinema trip.

Segel recalls, “It was right during puberty time… and you’re in a darkened theatre, so I ended up kissing the girl sitting next to me, who was in my class and I got in trouble, I got suspended. When I came home my mom wouldn’t speak to me but she had drawn pictures of me everywhere with the word ‘Pervert’ underneath.

“I had a little of that growing up and it makes you funny – I promise.” But he adds, “I also wore a Superman cape under my clothes until I was 12 years old… In my little kid brain, it was just in case.”

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Funnyman Jason Segel works seven-day weeks, so he barely has time to sleep, let alone have a girlfriend. Since he’s single, he tells iVillage exclusively that he wants “someone who’s nice. Funny helps, but nice comes first.” Maybe that’s because Segel’s sense of humor — which he says helps him with the ladies — is enough for two people!

The solo actor, 30, has a lot on his plate right now. He’s promoting Gulliver’s Travels (costarring Jack Black and Emily Blunt), is on CBS’ How I Met Your Mother and is starring in 2011′s Muppets movie, which he also wrote.

In a recent interview, you said the toughest part of Gulliver’s Travels was playing someone who Emily Blunt would be attracted to. Do you really believe that?
I don’t know if it’s the toughest part, but it really helped with the role because I had to feel like she was above my station in life, you know? So I think that actually really helped that I’m intimidated by Emily.

Some of us at iVillage are thinking of starting a “Make Jason Segel the Sexiest Man Alive” campaign.
I would highly encourage it. And, good luck! (Laughs) That would be very impressive!

You signed a contract for eight seasons of How I Met Your Mother. Will you be done after that?
I would have to see how I felt at eight seasons. I think once you’ve done your contract, you’ve done everything that you said that you would do. So I wouldn’t feel like it was abandoning ship or anything like that. Eight years is a good long time. But you know I love working on the show and I love my cast and crew so I think I’ll play it by ear when I get there.

Read the Complete Interview:www.ivillage.com

Just in time for the holidays, Jack Black stars in an adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century classic, “Gulliver’s Travels,” with a contemporary spin added to the source material. One of his co-stars, Jason Segel (of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal” and CBS’ “How I Met Your Mother” fame) recently spoke to CBSNews.com’s Ken Lombardi about this new family-friendly film and about his next collaboration with frequent comedic partner, Judd Apatow.

While watching the film, I thought to myself, ‘his neck must have hurt so much’ [from constantly having to look up at a giant-sized Jack Black].
Yeah, there is a lot of looking up, but luckily I am the same size as everyone in Lilliput [the miniature-sized region in which Gulliver finds himself], so Jack had to do a lot more looking down than I had to do looking up. But I did do a fair amount of looking up.

[Since Jack Black plays a giant and Jason plays a thumb-sized person] How did you and Jack film those scenes together?
We shot most of the scenes separately. On separate soundstages at separate times. But we would always go and be there for each other off-camera. So we did act quite a bit together, just not necessarily on-camera. But there are a couple scenes where they invented a special rig called the dual-Moco Roco. A dual motion-controlled remote control camera…that’s the real name. So we were on separate sound stages doing the same things at the same time with two cameras moving at different times. So we could just hear each other.

Tell me a little bit about your character [in "Gulliver's Travels"], Horatio. What is he like? Where did he come from?
Well, Horatio basically is a really, really sweet commoner who is imprisoned in Lilliput for flirting with the Princess…Princess Mary played by Emily Blunt. The Lilliputians, by nature, are a bit naive and very trusting. And so that part was easy, then you just do this face. This is a naive innocent face [intimates a quizzical facial gesture]. Then I added whenever I had to deal with the Princess, which separately is this face [another facial gesture], so then I put them together and I got basically this face [final sad-faced gesture.]

[Laughs] Did you read “Gulliver’s Travels” at all before this?
I read the Cliffs Notes in junior high, I think that’s the best I can say. Then once I got the part, of course, I read it over and over and over again. [He's joking.]

This is one of your first PG-rated starring movies?
Yeah, and “Dispacable Me.” This is my second family film. And, “The Muppets,” which comes out next year, will also be PG. So, I’m riding the family wave for a minute.

Do you like that? Kind of transitioning from more adult humor to—
Well, I’m trying to keep it mixed up. I also have a hard R-rated comedy called “Bad Teacher,” coming out next year. And another R-rated-kind-of-drama with Susan Sarandon and Ed Helms. So, I’m just trying to keep it mixed up. I don’t want people to be able to say, ‘THIS is what Jason does.’

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Jason Segel is spending much of this holiday season with his second family — namely, Kermit the Frog, Fozzy Bear and Miss Piggy. Segel is currently filming next year’s new Muppets movie — simply titled The Muppets and tentatively scheduled for a Nov. 23 release — and working with many of the same characters he grew up loving as a kid. It’s a true passion project for the How I Met Your Mother sitcom mainstay: He is the movie’s star, executive producer and co-writer alongside Nicholas Stoller, who directed Segel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

“I’m doing The Muppets and the TV show, and I have another script that we’re just finishing up to shoot this summer,” Segel says. (His next project is the R-rated comedy The Five-Year Engagement, teaming him again with producer Judd Apatow.) “I’m doing proper seven-day weeks, which I’ve never really done before. It’s pretty intense.”

In The Muppets, Segel plays Gary, a guy who lives in Smalltown, USA, with his best friend, a puppet named Walter.

“We have an Ernie-and-Bert relationship,” Segel says. “But he’s never met anyone like him, basically a puppet. His dream is to go to L.A. and meet the Muppets, because they’re the only people who he’s ever seen who are like him.”

The twosome finds out the famous Muppet Theater is in danger of being destroyed, so they work to get the Muppets all back together so they can raise $10 million in a telethon and save the place from certain doom.

The movie is not short on star power: Amy Adams and Chris Cooper are part of the human cast, and there is a slew of celebrity cameos, with everyone from Lady Gaga, Emily Blunt and Ricky Gervais to Jack Black, Zach Galifianakis and Jean-Claude Van Damme reportedly popping up.

But it’s performing with the likes of Gonzo, Sam the Eagle, Beaker, Bunsen Honeydew and Rowlf the Dog that excites Segel.

“It’s really, I must say, a childhood dream come true,” he says. “When Kermit comes out of his little box and all of a sudden he comes alive, it’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of.”

“I’ve worked with puppets for a long time,” adds Segel, who recalls making short films with puppets when he was 16. “It’s a lot of imagining that inanimate objects are alive, and I don’t know if this speaks to that I’m slowly going crazy, but I have gotten pretty good at that.”

He’s not shy to say that he actually cried during the first table read with Kermit, arguably the most famous creation of the late Jim Henson. “We had to stop and take a two-minute break because Segel lost his (composure) for a minute. And then I got a little worked up at a photo shoot,” Segel admits. “It really brings you back to your childhood when they put these puppets out. And it’s amazing — the puppeteer disappears within a minute of them operating one of these puppets. They’re standing right there, and you know it’s a human with a puppet on his hand, but for some reason you’re looking straight into the puppet’s eyes.”

Segel has been known to write songs for his acting projects — from Sarah Marshall all the way back to the short-lived series Freaks and Geeks. For The Muppets, though, soundtrack duty goes to Bret McKenzie, one half of the New Zealand comedy/music duo Flight of the Conchords. (The director of The Muppets, James Bobin, was also a co-creator of the Conchords’ HBO series.)

Segel had considered doing the Muppets music himself, but thought he might be too swamped to do it right.

“Also, I’m good at writing songs that are allowed to just be funny,” he says. “They don’t need to have a tremendous amount of musical merit, but these Muppet songs have to be great. The lineage of the Muppet songs, things like Rainbow Connection and all that, it’s not a job for an amateur. (McKenzie) really knows what he’s doing, and his songs have just been beautiful.”

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Funnyman Jason Segel couldn’t wait to get out of town after filming wrapped on the New Orleans, Louisiana set of his new comedy drama Jeff Who Lives At Home – because he packed on more than 20 pounds during the four months of shooting.

The Forgetting Sarah Marshall star reveals the movie is set over the course of one day, but they spent months shooting on location and he couldn’t help but indulge in all of the famous fried and fatty Southern foods. But the finishing result meant Segel’s waistline expanded with each take – and his weight gain was captured on camera.

He says, “It was my first sort of drama, it was pretty awesome. There’s comedy and drama. I loved New Orleans, however, it’s not a very healthy city. Everything’s cooked in butter, everything’s fried, there’s a lot of alcohol around. But the problem was the movie is placed over one day but we shot over four months and we shot it in order, so slowly you see my character gain like 30 pounds over one day! I gained like 23, 24 pounds.

“So (in the movie) I wake up in the morning, a fresh, just-arrived-in-New Orleans Jason Segel, and then the last scene of the movie, I’d been here four months, to a someone-get-me-out-of-here-quick Jason Segel! It was really bad.”

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Jason Segel is the man, I’m not really sure there is any other way to describe him. Not only is he in one of my favorite sitcoms on television (How I Met Your Mother) and on the forefront of bringing back The Muppets, he is also still working hard at his extremely solid feature film comedic career.

His next big film to release after The Muppets will be Five-Year Engagement, a romantic comedy that is being written by both Segel and Nicholas Stoller. Segel claims this won’t be your everyday rom-com that we’ve grown accustomed to, and they are trying to make it very special. You can check out what he had to say after the break!

“We will start shooting in April. It is a romantic comedy. Our goal is Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally and if we get within their stratosphere of substance, we will be happy. It really dissects relationships and aims to show how complicated they are over a long period of time. This is a five-year period and in that time things change and morph and the power dynamic shifts and people wane and eyes wonder and you question everything and this movie is about that in a funny way, I hope.”

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