- Born
- Birth nameJason Jordan Segel
- Height6′ 4″ (1.93 m)
- Multi-talented Jason Jordan Segel was born in Los Angeles, California, where he was raised by his parents, Jillian (Jordan), a homemaker, and Alvin Segel, a lawyer. His mother is of English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry, and his father is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. He was educated at St. Matthew's Parish School in Pacific Palisades, before moving on to Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles. During his education he showed an interest in acting and often performed in plays at the Palisades Playhouse.
His major break came in 1999, when he was cast as Nick Andopolis in Judd Apatow's well-regarded series Freaks and Geeks (1999). Further TV and film roles followed, notably in How I Met Your Mother (2005) and Knocked Up (2007). His film breakthrough, however, came in 2008's hit Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) which he wrote and starred in. Segel also co-wrote and starred in The Muppets (2011).
Segel is also a musician and songwriter, with his songs appearing in many projects including Freaks and Geeks (1999), Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), I Love You, Man (2009), How I Met Your Mother (2005) and Get Him to the Greek (2010).- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
- ParentsJillian JordanAlvin Segel
- RelativesAlison Segel(Sibling)Adam Segel(Sibling)
- Often sings in his performances
- Towering height
- Often plays nerdy and sensitive characters.
- Was chosen for the role of Marshall Eriksen in How I Met Your Mother (2005) because of his work on the short lived television show Freaks and Geeks (1999) of which creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas were huge fans.
- Had a five year relationship (March 2001-January 2007) with his Dead Man on Campus (1998) and Freaks and Geeks (1999) co-star Linda Cardellini. They played a couple both in the film and the TV show. Segel stated in an interview with Los Angeles Times that Cardellini was a great girlfriend and the title character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) was not based on her, it was more an amalgamation of a lot of different relationships and breakups he had.
- He plays piano.
- He was on a high school basketball team that won state in California.
- Received Harvard University's Hasty Pudding 2012 Man of the Year award on February 3, 2012.
- When a woman does nudity in a movie, men immediately switch into a sexual mode. For women, from what I understand, it's not like that. They see a naked, out-of-shape man crying and it's funny -- something weird, disturbing and disgusting we can all laugh at.
- {On his full-frontal performance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)] I drank a lot to get me through that. I remember just pacing up and down, drunk, with these voices in my head saying, "Jason, what are you doing?" I'm a little nervous, I won't get a date anymore, they won't be satisfied with what they saw.
- [on the Muppets] They'e not puppets. We never use the word puppet because Kermit is a frog, Piggy is a pig. They exist in the world, like we do.
- One thing that I think never goes out of style is just purity. Niceness and purity. And the Muppets have never lost that. Kermit especially is just wide-eyed wonder, unblinking. And he can't blink. Which I think probably helps.
- [on his religion] My father is Jewish and my mother is Christian... but I was raised Jewish. So I'm at this [Christian] school and they really don't like me very much there. And then after Christian school I would walk in the afternoons to Hebrew school, and then at Hebrew school they would tell me that I wasn't really Jewish because my mother is Christian. So all of a sudden I'm like this young kid--I would have been happy to believe whatever--whoever would have been nice to me. You know? But it was this feeling of like not really belonging or not really fitting in... What occurred to me is this certainly isn't God. God doesn't want an 11- and 12-year-old kid to feel this way. You know? That my belief in God is that God wants you. You know? God wants you to believe in him, or it, whatever you would call it. And so, it actually helped me forge this feeling of, "Alright, you know what, kid, it's you and God, and it's you and the world." It gave me a bit of a feeling of solitude that I think came in handy during my out-of-work periods, where when I decided the only way I was going to make it was if I started writing. It was actually--I'm very grateful that I got that feeling at such a young age, because I felt like, "You know what, *you* better do it. It's gotta be you."
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