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Season 6, Episode 14: Last Words Air Date: January 17, 2011
The gang travels home to Minnesota with Marshall where Ted and Barney will stop at nothing to make Marshall laugh. Meanwhile, Marshall has an unfortunate meeting with an old high school bully that terrorized him throughout his youth.
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Writer-director Nick Stoller talks The Greatest Muppet Movie of All Time and reveals his favourite character.
Remember the Dracula puppet musical that Jason Segel’s character creates while Forgetting Sarah Marshall? If so, it may not be a surprise to hear that Segel and Sarah Marshall director Nick Stoller have written the all-new Muppet movie, The Greatest Muppet Movie of All Time.
IGN: For anyone who’s seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s puppet finale, your Muppet connection doesn’t seem so strange now. Was that the inspiration?
Nick Stoller: Oh yeah. I am obsessed with the Muppets and Jason [Segel] is truly, truly obsessed. And that was our big inspiration for the [Sarah Marshall] ending. And honestly, for Jason, that puppet Dracula musical is something that, when he was out of work like five years ago, he actually wanted to do.
IGN: So is that what got you the Muppet movie writing gig? People saw that and said ‘Hang on…’
Stoller: Yeah, exactly! It’s funny because we interviewed a few different puppet companies for Sarah Marshall and ended up using [Jim] Henson. When Henson people came in, they ended up handing out puppets to everyone and I remember Jason couldn’t concentrate on the meeting because he was too busy fiddling about with his. But it was both our dream to write a Muppet movie and we worked on the script for so long. We’re really thrilled with how it’s turned out.
Jason Segel has tasted adult-comedy success, but the gentle giant has now found comfort in a younger audience, writes Jim Schembri.
TO SAY Jason Segel was in his element while providing a lead voice for the 3D animated family film Despicable Me is, he admits, something of an understatement. ”Animation and puppetry and kids’ stuff with a little edge has always been right in my wheelhouse, so this was a treat,” he says with glee.
In the film, Segel lends his voice to evil mastermind Vector, the even-more-evil rival of the nasty Gru (voiced by Segel’s comedy friend, Steve Carell). Vector is a short, nerdy, bespectacled, tracksuit-wearing bad guy whose mastery of technology draws immediate parodic comparisons with Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates.
Any resemblance is purely coincidental, as it turns out. ”I’ve been asked that before,” Segel laughs.
”He looks more like Bill Gates than I intended.”
As for the snivelling voice he developed for Vector, inspiration was close at hand and required no deep digging into the shady side of his psyche.
”Actually, it was really easy,” he says. ”I just figured this guy was super, super insecure and while he is really short and nerdy I’ve been six-four [193 centimetres] since I was 12.
”I was, like, six-four and 100 pounds [45 kilograms] for a couple of years, just this weird, gangly kid who was like ET trying to figure out how his limbs worked. So that’s what I drew on: the insecurity of my childhood. I’m, like, the least masculine man of all time. I happen to be gigantic but I’m pretty soft.”
The film has proved a huge hit, having taken more than $330 million worldwide, outdoing other 3D epics such as Monsters vs Aliens, How to Train Your Dragon, Ice Age 3 and Clash of the Titans. And it’s the latest feather in Segel’s increasingly weighty cap. As well as being a regular on popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother, the 30-year-old starred in hit bromance I Love You, Man and is best known for writing and starring in the neo-classic chick flick for guys, Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
There is some irony that Universal, the studio behind Despicable Me and Sarah Marshall, initially thwarted his ascent. Comedy uber producer-director Judd Apatow wanted Segel cast in The 40-Year-Old Virgin but the studio deemed him to be too much of a – well – a nobody. Despondency followed.
”’You know what?” Segel says. ”To be honest, yeah, that was an unpleasant time for me when 40-Year-Old Virgin didn’t work out.”
His career ”started out with a bang” on Apatow’s TV shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. Though the programs were short-lived, Segel’s comic potential was evident to Apatow and his colleagues.
”We kind of thought I was about to be America’s next great superstar,” Segel jests. ”Then, next thing you know, I didn’t work for five years. It was very, very tough but it drove me to write Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
”Then I started doing my TV show [How I Met Your Mother] and everything really changed in the next few years.”
Indeed they did. Segel has now been on HIMYM for six years, ”couldn’t be more proud of” Despicable Me, is set to appear in Gulliver’s Travels at Christmas, has just wrapped the drama Jeff Who Lives at Home opposite Susan Sarandon, stars in the romantic comedy Bad Teacher with Cameron Diaz and is planning to shoot another comedy with Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller next year, titled Five-Year Engagement. ”So I’m a happy dude,” he chirps.
Furthermore, Get Him to the Greek, which Stoller directed, features Russell Brand reprising rock star Aldous Snow, who Segel created for Sarah Marshall. At the risk of being nosey, does Segel get royalties for that? ”You bet your ass I do,” he says with a distinctly hearty laugh.
He credits much of his success to the work ethic instilled in him by Apatow. There ”absolutely” is an Apatow school of comedy, Segel says. ”He taught us about hard work and about how, if you’re willing to put in the effort and pay your dues and do a ton of writing and a ton of acting, he’ll be there to support you. He’s really the best mentor someone could hope for.”
The man/child theme common to many Apatow comedies is something on which Segel was eager to put his own stamp, first with Sarah and then with I Love You, Man.
”One of the things Judd really taught us is to write from the truth we know,” Segel says.
”It’s such a broad thing to say but I really am interested in exploring the gritty, gritty truth of what’s going on with me … When I get to the point where I have kids, I’ll probably write a movie and explore that.”
Meanwhile, Segel is busy preparing to make a movie for children – the much-anticipated new Muppets film, tentatively (and modestly) titled The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made.
”The Muppets were legitimately my first comic influence,” he says. ”This movie isn’t like retroactive love. Any of my friends will tell you I’ve had Muppet figures and Muppet puppet replicas in my house for 20 years. I just love them and I’ve been making short films with puppets for a long time.”
While preparing the puppet sequence for Sarah, Segel worked with the company of late Muppets creator Jim Henson. He asked to see Kermit and Miss Piggy and was told Disney now owned them.
”Something clicked in my mind. ‘Oh. Got it.”’ Segel says, before pausing. His tone now becomes very serious. ”I felt like the Muppets had changed at some point and I think I know why. So I went to Disney and pitched an idea for a new Muppet movie that was in the spirit of the late-’70s, early-’80s movies and The Muppet Show. Now, three years later, we’re getting ready to start making this movie at the end of the year.”
He went full frontal for the role, but he was adament it wouldn’t pigeonhole him into the buddy comedy roles popular with Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd.
That’s why he turned to the fuzzy comedy of The Muppets.
“Sarah Marshall had just come out and everyone was expecting my next movie would be an R-rated comedy,” he said.
“I went to Disney on a blind pitch and I went, ‘You guys own The Muppets and these guys are my big comic influences – I would really like a shot at bringing The Muppets back’,” he said.
“They all chuckled at me like they thought I was making a joke, and I was, ‘No, I’m serious’ and the next hing you know three years later we’re going to make a Muppet movie.”
Jason gears up for the battle of the villains in ‘Despicable Me’
In the 3-D animated film “Despicable Me,” Jason Segel voices the character of Vector, who is in a fierce battle with a character named Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) to become the greatest villain in the world. The two rivals try to outdo each other to the point that the safety of the world may be at stake.
Segel discussed his experience making the film at a “Despicable Me” press conference in Los Angeles. Segel also talked about what the future may hold for his character in the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”
Can you tell us what it’s like to play such a delicious villain?
I was given a sketch very early, and I have a bit of a background in puppetry. So coming up with a voice to match this sketch I was given was my real inspiration. I had a few months to come up with a voice, and I came up with a few and I went in and they helped me choose. These guys are such geniuses. The one they ended up choosing was perfect.
Obviously, you look nothing like your character, but did you see any mannerisms that they picked up from you?
I’m going to answer that question two-fold. One, I was very excited, the whole thing that drew me to doing an animated film is that you’re freed from the physical limitations of your physical body. All of a sudden you get to be something that has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a 6′ 4″, kind of lumbering dude. And that was really exciting; puppetry is very similar. And then this guy is based almost wholly on insecurity. He just wants to prove to his dad that he’s worthy, in this case the most evil person alive.
So I kind of drew from there. It was very freeing. I think for all of the cast, you’ll probably notice, that nobody is doing their voice. Steve, myself, Russell [Brand], Julie [Andrews] — no one is talking like they normally talk and it’s because all of a sudden you’re freed from the physical limitations of how you look, which is amazing.
Vector kind of looks like Bill Gates …
He does a bit like Bill Gates, yeah!
In Despicable Me (in theaters Friday),Jason Segel voices a character desperately seeking his father’s approval. In real life, he has that and more.
“I have the most supportive parents in the world,” Segel says, trying to stretch out on a West Hollywood hotel room sofa that’s a little too small for his 6-foot-4 frame.
“But I can relate to wanting approval. My father is a lawyer, and I was on that path. I come from a family of lawyers, doctors and money managers. But they want me to be happy,” he says. “The way I got started was so unique. I got seen in a high school play. My parents knew that opportunity doesn’t necessarily ring twice and that I should go after it.”
Thirteen years ago, Segel was a college-bound basketball player. Today at age 30, he is one of Hollywood’s busiest young talents. When he’s not playing the lovable Marshall Eriksen in the popular CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, he’s working on films. But becoming an actor was never part of Segel’s plan.
It all started in his 90-minute art history class at school in Los Angeles. “The class was right next to the drama department, so it was purely geographical that this started. I picked plays off the bookshelf and read them during the lectures.”
One of his choices was Edward Albee’s Zoo Story. “The play has a 25-minute monologue,” Segel says. “I quite simply wanted to see if I could memorize that much material. And once I did, I thought, ‘I guess I should perform this.’ Oddly enough, (a Paramount Studios casting executive) happened to come to the production.”
Thus a career was born.
In addition to the animated 3-D family film Despicable Me, Segel has three more upcoming films. In the live-action Gulliver’s Travels, which is due out in December, he plays Horatio alongside Jack Black’s Gulliver. In Bad Teacher, he is involved in a love triangle with Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake. And in Jeff Who Lives at Home, he shares the screen with Susan Sarandon and Ed Helms.
He also is responsible for reviving the Muppets, convincing rights-owner Disney that he should write the screenplay for The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made. The film goes into production later this year.
“The Muppets truly were my first comic influence. Kermit was the first version of Tom Hanks that I got to know. He’s Jimmy Stewart, the idea of the Everyman, which is what I try to do,” he says.
His latest role as Vector in Despicable Me, about how a super-villain (voiced by Steve Carell) is tamed by three little girls, is Segel’s first attempt at voicing a film character.
The isolating nature of voicing an animated character initially bothered Segel. “Once I got used to not having instant feedback, it was a really fun process. They open the mike and let you riff for two or three hours at a time — a bit self-indulgent, but it’s a blast.”
Also a blast: Weaving personal experiences into his screenplays. Like the nude breakup scene in 2008′s Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
“When I was really young, my mother said to me, ‘When you go out in the world, you’re representing the job I did as a mother,’ ” Segel says. “She wasn’t really happy that I showed my penis. In true motherly fashion, she sent out a mass e-mail to my family saying, ‘I just want you all to know that in Jason’s upcoming film, he has chosen to do full frontal nudity, but please note, it is not gratuitous and is essential to the plot.’ ”
Segel says How I Met Your Mother, which begins its sixth season this fall, changed his life. “I was happy to sign for another year,” he says. “But once I’ve fulfilled what I said I’d do (eight years), I’ll probably move on — although in this economy, you can’t scoff at having a steady job.”
Segel says his character Marshall is “the least like me of all the characters I’ve played. I’m mostly a mix of my characters from Sarah Marshall and I Love You, Man.”
Although Segel has been in several long-term relationships, including a five-year-long stint with Freaks and Geeksco-star Linda Cardellini, he doesn’t feel the urge to settle down.
“The 30s are when men hit their stride. I feel pleasantly old,” he says. “There’s some gray in my beard, but I’m still having fun. But I’m working awfully hard. I guess that’s being a man.”
Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segel goes dark ‘n’ dorky as Vector, the upstart mastermind giving protagonist Gru (Steve Carell) a run for his title as the #1 supervillain in the world in the animated flick Despicable Me. But in contrast to his dastardly gadget-wielding alter ego, Segel harbors a distinctly un-villainous soft spot when it comes to what Despicable Me is all about: bringing people together and giving families something special to share when they go to the movies.
That said, Segel was chock full of material both naughty and nice when we caught up with him in Los Angeles. Alternately self-deprecating and sarcastic, cheekily cocksure and sensitive, the Judd Apatow protégé held us rapt discussing Despicable Me, the Muppets flick he’s writing, comedy how-tos, his height, being bullied as a child, why he learned the piano, and how he lost his virginity. (Hint: the latter two are related.)
Below, ten of the best bits, from Jason Segel’s mouth to your brain.
On why his role in Despicable Me was more freeing than any live-action character could be:
“The whole thing that drew me to doing an animated film is that you’re freed from the physical limitations of your physical body. All of a sudden you get to be something that has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a 6′ 4″, kind of lumbering dude… all of a sudden I could be 5′ 3″, wear an orange jumpsuit, and be nerdy. You know in real life I’m, like, SUPER good looking.”
On how his own childhood helped him get into character as the evil, nerdy villain, Vector:
“I’ve been 6′ 4″ since I was 12. I was 6′ 4″, 100 lbs. I looked like Jack Skellington. Kids used to stand around me in a circle and one by one they would jump on my back and the rest would chant, ‘Ride the oaf! Ride the oaf!’ It’s true. So you either become funny, which is hopefully what I did, or you become a villain, which is where I got the idea for Vector; he’s a guy who was horribly picked on and this is where he’s ended up.”
On how and why his musical talents first came about:
“I taught myself to play piano when I was 17 to pick up girls… The first thing I did was I found a really not-that-intelligent girl and I told her that I wrote ‘Your Song,’ by Elton John. I was like, ‘I wrote this for you.’ And then I lost my virginity.”
On the hardest part of recording a vocal performance for an animated film:
“It’s very easy to come out and say funny lines that you’ve thought of the night before, but to be on story is the real challenge. So you’re in there for three hours trying to give them material they can actually use. I have a million jokes I could say, but to try to make it on story and valuable to them was something that was a challenge, and I really enjoyed that idea. It’s just you alone, which is kind of awesome — a lot of the time other actors really slow me down, because they’re not quite as good as me.”
On his most despicable moment, which happened while doing a promotional bit for Despicable Me:
“We got to play with the minions a bit, who I think are the cutest element to the movie. We did a little conga line with them. It was a bit awkward, because, to be honest, it’s midgets in outfits. And at one point I had to come up with something funny, and I said, ‘Hey, can I throw this ball off of your head and see if it bounces back to me?’ And one of the guys in the outfits said, ‘You’ve got to remember, I’m a real human being.’ And then I felt really awkward. That’s my worst moment. To date.”
On his celebrity nemesis:
“I think it’s probably Ryan Reynolds, in that we have very similar comedic tastes and all that, and our bodies are so [similar] that it’s basically a rivalry over who can be in better shape. At this point, I think I’m winning.”
The best advice he has on writing comedy:
“Write a drama. I’m not joking. That was the first advice I got from Judd Apatow, and I think it’s why his movies are so brilliant. He told me when I was writing Forgetting Sarah Marshall, ‘I want the first draft you give me to be a drama. We’ll make it funny. It’s going to be funny because we’re funny, and we’re going to add jokes, and the people you cast will be funny. The reason people will see it — and see it again and again or connect to it — is because there’s an underlying drama.’ So that’s the best advice I can give when you’re trying to write a comedy: first write a drama, and then make it funny.”
On his upcoming Muppets film:
“I’m very earnest about the way I approach it. There’s no sense of irony with me, going into The Muppets. I don’t think it’s funny that I’m doing The Muppets. I truly love them.”
On the scene that made him cry in Despicable Me:
“I cried at the end. I’m not a real cryer, but at the end of the movie, Gru — Steve Carell, who did his part to perfection — reads a story to these kids, and part of the theme is that even the coldest heart can be melted by love. That really got me. The movie is perfect.”
On the role that, years ago, he instantly knew he wasn’t going to get:
“When I was 18, I was allegedly really close to playing Dustin Hoffman’s son. I knew I wasn’t going to get that part. I’m like eight inches taller than Dustin Hoffman! I might be a foot taller than Dustin Hoffman. It just wasn’t going to happen. So it hindered me then, when I was playing a boy. Now that I’m playing a man, it’s a bit easier. Girls have heels. Dustin Hoffman in heels isn’t a good look.”
And a bonus one, just because:
“I think recycling is a myth – an Internet myth.” He was kidding, of course. I think. Listen for the voices of Steve Carell, Russell Brand, and Segel (in the body of a 5′ 3″, bespectacled nerd-villain) in Despicable Me, in theaters this week.
Jason Segel is on a hit TV show (“How I Met Your Mother”) and has a host of movies in various stages of completion – including the new “Despicable Me” – but he recently found the time to appear at a San Francisco comedy event, providing dramatic readings from pop-star autobiographies.
“I filled in for a friend and it ended up being a blast,” he says of his first standup-esque experience. “I did the Jonas Brothers and I think it was David Cassidy – it was one of the Partridges – and Tommy Lee.” Was it difficult to keep the Jonas and Lee memoirs separated in his mind? “Absolutely, they have very similar lifestyles.”
He takes a moment to reflect on the most important life lesson he picked up: “Don’t write an autobiography when you’re still in your 20s.”
One night not long ago, Jason Segel walked out of a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and saw a kid on the sidewalk, maybe 17, struggling to light what appeared to be a half-smoked cigarette. Segel, a smoker himself and a friend to fiends in need—”There’s not too many of us left,” he points out—proffered a fresh one from his own pack. The kid looked up, face full of withering 17-year-old pity, and said, “This is a joint, sir.”
The sir—that was the worst part, Segel says, laughing about it a few weeks later while seated outside the same restaurant. You can build a career playing, and writing about, guys blithely enjoying protracted young-dudehoods, clinging to their puppets (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), their “jerk-off station”-equipped man-caves (I Love You, Man), or their bongs (Knocked Up), but eventually you turn 30, teenage potheads look at you like you’re as old as Jay Leno, and your carefully calibrated real-life perma-dudehood falls victim to the working week.
“I miss smoking a ton of pot,” Segel says, genuinely wistful. “I can’t do it anymore. I’ve got too much work.” There’s his role as TV’s most realistic contentedly hitched goofball on How I Met Your Mother, which is a five-days-a-week gig. The Gulliver’s Travels movie he’s finishing up with Jack Black. The romantic comedy he just wrapped with Cameron Diaz and the one he’s doing with the brothers Duplass, of mumblecore microfame. And the script he’s fine-tuning for a new and, he hopes, franchise-rebooting Muppet movie.
When this interview is over, he’s got to go brainstorm a list of celebrities to tap for cameos in that last project—but he plans to do that at a bar, perhaps before or after taking a nap. Not everything has changed: We meet up at Meltdown Comics—Despicable Me, the 3-D CGI movie Segel is promoting, is sort of an evil version of The Incredibles, with Segel and Steve Carell voicing rival supervillains—but Segel presented at the Writers Guild Awards last night, and when he arrives, comedy-business-cazh in a roomy plaid western shirt and jeans, he’s hurting from a long night of after-afterpartying, so we repair to the place across the street to talk in a more hangover-friendly context. Egg sandwiches on focaccia and a bottle of what turns out to be nerve-toxin-grade hot sauce are procured; Segel lights up his first smoke and starts coming back to life.
