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.”