NEED TO KNOW
Harrison Ford once offered some very memorable feedback to his future Shrinking costar, Jason Segel.
In his conversation with Seth Rogen for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Segel, 45, recalled how the Apple TV+ comedy booked the legendary Indiana Jones star in the first place.
“Harrison Ford is the kind of person you make an offer to so that for three days you can say, ‘We’ve made an offer to Harrison Ford,’ and then you’ll pick the real guy,” explained Segel, who stars in and co-created Shrinking with Brett Goldstein and Bill Lawrence.
Ford, 82, “read it, and he didn’t know anything about me. Brett Goldstein met with him, and they had a really nice meeting, and they sent him The End of the Tour and Forgetting Sarah Marshall [to watch].”
Responding to the latter 2008 romantic comedy, in which Segel has a full-frontal nude scene, Ford had thoughts. “Bill Lawrence got a text that said, ‘I’m in. And tell the kid, great d–k,’ ” revealed Segel.
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The How I Met Your Mother star first confirmed Ford’s surprising words on an episode of The Daily Show last year, saying he had them printed and framed.
“I would take that,” responded Rogen, 43, who stars in and co-creates the Hollywood send-up The Studio. Asked how he booked many of the Apple TV+ comedy’s celebrity cameos, Rogen brought up another industry legend: Martin Scorsese.
“I did meet Martin Scorsese once,” recalled Segel in reply. “I met him at the Golden Globes, and we peed next to each other at the urinals. But I had the kids’ one and he had the tall one. So everything about it was just way off. That’s a great memory.”
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Ford, who worked primarily in movies before signing onto Shrinking and Paramount+ drama 1923, has said he jumped at the challenge of accepting both those roles. “I took the job without a script on both of them, on faith that the people who created the projects were going to deliver me a good script,” the Star Wars actor told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023.
In their Actors on Actors interview, Segel and Rogen reminisced about meeting on the set of Freaks and Geeks, plus the many comedies they collaborated on in the years after the breakout series.
Shrinking, which aired its second season last fall, has been renewed for a third. The Studio, debuting this spring, has been renewed for a second season. Both stream on Apple TV+.
