Jason Segel Says Shrinking Has Changed His Perspective on Fatherhood

Jason Segel is thinking a lot about fatherhood and family thanks to his role as a grieving single dad and therapist in Apple TV+’s Shrinking.

Segel is back on our screens as Jimmy in the highly-anticipated season two of the hit comedy-drama series. The series, which Segel co-created with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, follows a pretty provocative premise: What if a therapist broke all the rules and told clients exactly what to do?

The results of Jimmy’s experiment vary but what remains consistent is the heartwarming story of self-exploration that unfolds as we see Jimmy navigate life with his teen daughter Alice after the death of his wife.

For Segel, Jimmy’s introspection has led to a case of life imitating art for the actor who told SheKnows that playing a dad for two seasons has him thinking about his own life.

“I am not a parent in real life, but all of a sudden I find myself very comfortably [being] the parent of a grown up on this show,” Segel tells us. “It’s caused me to reflect a little bit on how long I’ve been doing this job.”

“I feel really comfortable with the whole thing. I love Lukita [Maxwell] so much and I feel very paternal towards her,” he adds. “When she like kills these scenes, which she does more and more this season… she’s just an absolute acting assassin, and I just feel really proud.”

When pressed on whether the role has opened his eyes up to possibly becoming a dad someday, Segel, who has been dating actress Kayla Radomski since October 2023, kept it coy. “It’s opened my eyes up to being like more proud of somebody than I am about myself,” he says.

The show, which also stars Harrison Ford, has been praised for it’s candid exploration of life in your 40s, its joys and its tribulations which, for Segel, is less of an artistic choice and more of a natural state of being.

“That’s the only way I really know how to act,” Segel tells us, “[I] figure out what parts of me are like the character I’m trying to play and make those the most important parts, and then just be as honest as I can on camera.”

“In every performance, I try to have all the characters be different, but I try to have them be as many aspects of me as possible.”

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