In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
On “Shrinking,” Jason Segel plays a grieving therapist named Jimmy Laird who tries to find healing by getting far more candid with his patients. (Segel also co-created the series with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein; Season 2 premiered this past December.) So it’s no surprise that, when he joined us on In the Envelope, our wide-ranging conversation turned into a bit of a therapy session for actors navigating the inevitable ups and downs of an artist’s life. “It’s all hard,” Segel tells us.
“The business moves in cycles, so the amount of juice you have is changing. It’s really hard for a while, but then all of a sudden something like ‘Shrinking’ gets made, and then someone says, ‘Hey, what about that screenplay you wrote three years ago?’ ”
The irony, Segel says with a smile, is that “they tell you all of this” at the beginning, just like he’s doing right now. “They tell you it’s going to be hard, that it’s impersonal, that the business will spit you out. You know all this going in, but if you believed it, you wouldn’t stand a chance.”
On this episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast, Segel digs deep into his entire career—the burnout he felt early on, the life-altering work on projects like “The End of the Tour” and “Shrinking,” and why he felt renewed after moving out of Hollywood.
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