Hollywood loves an actor that can fill a particular role, and typecasting is a real thing. Some performers are simply better than others in certain areas of the business. Tom Cruise, for instance, is an incredible action star.
Jason Segel is a great comedic performer who has been busy since How I Met Your Mother was on the air. Segel has changed quite a bit, and he has shifted away from comedic acting these days.
Let's take a closer look at the actor and see if he is totally done with comedies.
Why Jason Segel Won't Do Comedies
Jason Segel is a performer who has been in the business for years, and he has put together a wildly successful career. His success can be found on both the big and small screen, and many would consider him to be an underrated performer.
On television, he had the opportunity to star on Freaks and Geeks, one of the most celebrated shows of all time. He has done plenty of television work since then, most notably on How I Met Your Mother, one of the biggest hit sitcoms of its era.
On the big screen, the actor has found plenty of success, too. He has been in movies like Slackers, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek, Despicable Me, Bad Teacher, and The Muppets,
As you can tell by the credits that we have listed, Jason Segel is someone who has thrived in comedic roles for decades now. However, the actor has charted a different course in recent years.
Jason Segel Changed Things Up For 'Our Friend'
In 2021, fans finally got to see Our Friend, a movie that promised a totally different side of Jason Segel. Instead of the funnyman that people had grown familiar with, Segel was switching gears and taking on a more dramatic role.
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite noted that, while Segel is best known for comedy, he has the chops to switch gears for dramatic roles.
"He obviously understands comedy probably better than anybody, but, for me, it’s this reservoir of emotion and sometimes darkness, sometimes even pain, that I can see, in his eyes," the director said.
It's interesting to see Segel have such a dramatic shift in the character that he plays in projects, and this movie showed his versatility.
When dishing on his character in the project, Segel said, "This is a guy, very much like me in a way, who is there to make the room brighter, there to take the steam out of the vent. But when he goes home at night, he’s sad and dealing with this more complicated, rich, interior life. I felt like I’d be good at that.”
It is pretty impressive to see what the actor was able to accomplish with his performance in the movie, but it did have people wondering about whether he would continue to do comedy films in the future.
Is Jason Segel Done With Comedy?
So, is Jason Segel completely done with comedy? Well, it's impossible to predict whether he will stay away permanently, but the actor has shifted his attention to fresher and truer ideas.
Segel did reveal to Huff Post, "I reached a point of doing 10 or 15 years of a lot of really great comedy and, don’t get me wrong, I loved every minute of it ... but I’m not exploring anything that I’m actually going through in my real life anymore. I’m exploring stuff that 24-year-old me was thinking about, still."
As we have seen since the movie came out, Siegel has continued to focus on more dramatic roles. Currently, he is being featured on the HBO series Winning Time, which is a dramatic period piece focused on the Showtime era of the Los Angeles Lakers.
When dishing on playing Paul Westhead on Winning Time, Segel said, "There is some intentionality behind the way that you meet Paul Westhead in this series ... For a million reasons, he seems like the last choice to be the head coach of the Lakers. That's by design because when Jack McKinney goes down, the idea that this guy is going to take over should feel like the worst idea in the world when you reach that moment in the series."
Jason Segel sure does seem like he's done with comedy for now, but here's hoping he takes on a funny project in the near future.
