Jason Segel

Jason Segel came up on two Judd Apatow television shows that almost nobody watched at the time. Freaks and Geeks lasted a single season, Undeclared lasted a single season, and between them they became the hiring pool for the next decade of American screen comedy. Segel spent the years afterwards in supporting parts, then landed Marshall Eriksen on How I Met Your Mother in 2005 and stayed for nine years.

The useful thing about Segel is that he is very large and completely unguarded, and he built a career on the distance between those two facts. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which he wrote himself, opens with him weeping and naked and then spends its running time treating a heartbroken man as funny rather than pathetic. He runs the same play as Sydney Fife in I Love You, Man, where the joke is that the loud friend is the emotionally competent one, and again in The Muppets, which he co-wrote out of unembarrassed love for the material.

The comedies got worse as they got more expensive: Gulliver's Travels and Sex Tape are the low points, and Bad Teacher has no idea what to do with him. The interesting move was sideways. He played David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour and got an Independent Spirit nomination for a performance built on caution rather than openness, then took a run of quiet films nobody saw in Jeff, Who Lives at Home, The Discovery and Windfall. In 2023 he co-created Shrinking with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein and plays a therapist who has stopped filtering himself, which is the exact centre of what he is good at.