Jason Segel Shares Why He Moved Away From Hollywood After How I Met Your Mother

Jason Segel’s departure from Hollywood? We’ll allow it.

After finishing his nine-season run as Marshall Eriksen on How I Met Your Mother in 2014, the actor opted to move out of Los Angeles for a quieter life in a small town—despite a string of hits like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and I Love You, Man.

“I was having a really roaring 20s,” Jason, 44, told Hoda Kotb during an interview on the Today show Oct. 16. “I had How I Met Your Mother and I was also writing a bunch of movies that were successful and doing well, but I wasn’t doing a lot of personal check-ins because I was so busy.”

“I realized that art is supposed to be a reflection of what you’re going through,” he continued, “and I actually wasn’t going through much life-wise. So at 33 years old, I’m like, ‘Why am I still writing movies about being afraid of girls?’”

Upon leaving L.A. and heading northwest for Ojai, Calif.—which he described as “calm” in a 2023 interview with the Los Angeles Times—the Shrinking star began doing the soul-searching he craved.