Jason Segel remains one of the most talented, albeit underrated, entertainers in Hollywood. The How I Met Your Mother star is seemingly a jack-of-all-trades, having made a name for himself as an actor, screenwriter, comedian, author, and producer. Although Jason has recently stepped away from comedy, some of his most iconic works lie in this genre.
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Notably, the 42-year-old wrote and starred in one of the most hilarious and well-written comedies of the 2000s; Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
The film revolves around Peter Bretter, a slobbish music composer, who after getting dumped by his five-year girlfriend, decides to take an impromptu trip to Hawaii to get over his troubles. We take a look at one of the film's most iconic scenes and how Segel's famously troubled love life inspired it.
Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) and Sarah Marshall's (Kristen Bell) break-up scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall is truly a masterpiece. In the scene, Bretter is forced to endure an impromptu break-up with his five-year girlfriend, Sarah Marshall, while stark naked.
"I play a guy who composes the music and is sort of just dying inside because he wants to be a proper musician, and his girlfriend is the star of the show," Jason told NPR in 2015. "And so, one day, she comes over to the house, and I think she's there to have intercourse with me. So I'm waiting there naked for her, and she proceeds to dump me while I'm naked."
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Interestingly, the bizarre scene was inspired by a truly devastating breakup in Segel's real life. "That was taken from the pages of real life," Jason admitted to NPR. "I once got dumped while I was naked, but she asked me to put clothes on during this real breakup, my real-life breakup, and as opposed to in the movie when I say no, I did go to put clothes on. So she waited for me while I went back into my room to get dressed."
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While the real-life break-up was a truly monumental event in his life, Jason couldn't help but think of using it in a movie while it was happening.
"I think maybe this is the mind of a writer, I guess" he shared. "But it was - while this breakup is happening, which was probably the most significant moment of my life to date, you know, when that happened, and I'm naked, and the whole time I'm thinking this is really, really funny. I'm going to use this in a movie someday."
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While Segel recognized how hysterical a breakup scene featuring full-frontal nudity would be, he didn't script it just for comic effect.
"I know it's a comedy, and so everything has to be funny, but I didn't want that breakup scene to be funny," he explained to NPR. "I didn't want it to be played for laughs, you know? 'Cause I think it was a really important part of the movie, this - that the breakup be as painful as possible. So I thought the backdrop of me being naked gave me the opportunity to play the scene totally seriously because every time you cut back to me naked, you're going to get a laugh, you know?"
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While incredibly hilarious, the break-up scene is so striking that one can't help but wonder what Segel hoped to accomplish by having his character get dumped while naked.
"I hate romantic comedies for the reason that you always know how it's going to end," Segel explained to NPR in 2015. "The guy's going to end up with the girl, like, hey, probably that girl who's been really nice to him the whole movie, works at the cookie shop, you know? You can tell what's about to happen."
The Knocked Up star hoped that the scene would challenge his audience's expectations and keep them on their toes. "I thought as a viewer, if in the very first scene of the movie your lead actor is suddenly full-frontal, you know, naked, you're forced to sort of throw out your expectations and sit back and say I don't know what's going to happen in this movie, you know? So I think it sort of set the stage to lose any preconceptions about what the movie might be like."
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