Jason Segel Reveals Why He Left Hollywood for a ‘Little Country Town’ After How I Met Your Mother Success

Jason Segel is getting candid about his decision to leave behind the bright lights of Hollywood for life in a small town. 

During an appearance on the Today show on Wednesday, Oct. 16, the Shrinking star, 44, opened up to Hoda Kotb about choosing to move out of L.A. after How I Met Your Mother ended in 2014.

“You did something so interesting,” Kotb says. “A lot of people would’ve just taken a big dive into Hollywood, but you did something else. You pulled up stakes and moved away from all that. Why’d you do that?”

“I was having a really roaring twenties,” Segel responds. “I had How I Met Your Mother and I was also writing a bunch of movies that were successful and doing well.”

Despite his success with the CBS sitcom and films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Segel says he wasn’t “doing a lot of personal check-ins because I was so busy.”

He continues, “I realized that art is supposed to be a reflection of what you’re going through and I actually wasn’t going through much life-wise.”

Thus, he made the decision to change his environment in the hope that he might find more peace and fulfillment. 

“So I moved out of LA,” he tells Kotb. “I moved to a little country town and I started to ask myself questions like, ‘What do you actually like? What are you actually thinking about right now? Who do you want to be as a performer and an artist?’

Segel previously shared that he had moved to the town of Ojai, Calif. in a June 2023 interview with the Los Angeles Times. He spoke about the sense of “calm” he feels in the small town in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, where he now lives in a stone house nestled in the middle of an orange grove. 

He first explored the area while trying to “get out of his head” in preparation for his 2015 film The End of the Tour. 

“Being there had the really interesting side-effect of realizing — after six weeks time, mind you — that, ‘Oh, my gosh. I finally feel calm,’” Segel told the outlet. “And it occurred to me that when you’re doing this job and living in L.A., you’re never leaving campus.” 

He continued, “So it was like this whole new experience to realize that when someone outside of Hollywood asks, ‘What are you up to?’ they mean, like, right now. So the answer is: ‘Oh. I’m on my way to the grocery store,’ not ‘I have three projects in development.’”