courtesy of one of my favorite readers!

If you haven’t read it already, Jason Segel did a great interview in GQ recently and had some fun thoughts on How I Met Your Mother. I highly encourage you to read the entire GQ interview with Segel. He had some very funny thoughts on HIMYM:

That’s one of the things I’ve always liked about How I Met Your Mother—it uses those details, about where the characters work and what they do, to inform character and drive stories.
One of the things I like about it, as trivial as it sounds, is that they hang out in a bar. Yes. Yes.

The Friends were always in a coffee shop.
Yeah. Come on. I was so happy, just for the simple fact that they acknowledged that people go to bars at night. They don’t go to a coffee shop.

You want to know my theory? We’re going to find out at some point that the mother’s dead. And adult Ted has been telling them all these stories about the mother they never knew. It’ll retroactively cast the entire show in this dark-comic light.
[without missing a beat] I suggested that also.

Really?
Yeah.

How was that received?
Scoffing. They don’t care about what I say. [laughs] I had two other suggestions, too. One is that they’re dead. The two kids and their father—they’re dead, and they’re in purgatory, and he’s telling the story for eternity.

The most un-fun thought though concerned how long he would stay with the show:

How many more years do you have on How I Met Your Mother?
Three more years.

Do you think it’s going to go longer than that?
[carefully] It’s an amazing place to be. But when you become an actor, part of it, the secret part of it, is that you don’t want to work a regular nine-to-five job. And the secret part of a TV show is that it’s a nine-to-five job. And eight years is longer than any relationship I’ve ever been in, it’s longer than any school I went to. I think after eight years, I’ll feel like I honorably did my commitment. It’s funny—it’s the greatest problem in the world to have. Jeez—I’m the luckiest guy in the world. But when your idol is Peter Sellers, playing one character for eight years isn’t what you’re trying to do. I don’t really feel like I have that much more to offer with this character. Maybe if we got divorced or something—but that’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be some iteration of, like, my TV wife opens the fridge, and she’s like, “What happened to the birthday cake?” And I walk in with a little frosting here [points to corner of mouth] like, “What birthday cake?”

So does that mean HIMYM has 3 more years or what? I suppose it could always end sooner, but I can’t see them going past a Season 8 with Marshall as part of the cast and we’ve already seen too much of his future to remove him in some manner. Sound off in the comment and vote in our poll as well, What you you think?

*photo from GQ

As we all know, the HIMYM cast love side projects. Neil Patrick Harris is gonna be a smurf, Josh Radnor has happthankyoumoreplease that did so well at Sundance and now Jason Segel has landed a staring role in the new Muppets movie. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Segel will play the human actor in their next movie, though many of the other details are still under wrap. The TV show as well as some of the movies tended to have one key human actor with whom the Muppets associated on their adventures. It is known that Segel plays a man on a quest to find and reunite the Muppets.