On the set of Universal Pictures’ romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, actor/screenwriter Jason Segel confessed it’s been a dream come true to hear his script come to life. “What I like more than hearing the words I’ve written out loud is hearing stuff I‘ve written improved by the actors. These guys are just amazing,” said Segel. “I got really, really lucky. Kristen [Bell] and Mila [Kunis] couldn’t be better. This guy Russell Brand is going to be a huge star. He’s a genius, so I’m surrounded by great people.”
Segel’s currently starring in the hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother, but that show’s not his first attempt at work on TV. Segel’s a member of the Freaks and Geeks/Undeclared gang, two short-lived comedies from Judd Apatow that also starred the now red-hot Seth Rogen. Segel’s remained close to Apatow and that relationship is what helped him get his screenplay for Forgetting Sarah Marshall launched into production at Universal. “Judd and I had a talk and he basically said, ‘I can get movies made now. If you have any ideas, let me know.’ I gave him a short pitch of this and I think three days later contracts arrived, so then it was my job to get the script in order,” explained Segel.
“It all happened very quickly over the past couple years, the idea, the kernel sort of came in my mind,” said Segel about the genesis of the script. “I wrote the first 20 pages earlier, like a year and a half ago. And then I finished the rest once I went to Hawaii, which was several months later. But no, it’s all just as I have terrible dates, more ideas come. That’s basically how it happened.”
Segel describes Forgetting Sarah Marshall as a romantic disaster comedy, something a little different from your normal rom-com. “Unlike your typical romantic comedy, it’s not just a relationship unfolding. It’s a guy having to deal with, literally, his worst nightmare while all that’s going on, so I think there’s an extra added element of it being your worst nightmare which a lot of romantic comedies don’t have. I show up in Hawaii to clear my head and my ex-girlfriend, Sarah Marshall, is there with her new boyfriend. That’s the plot of the movie.”
Even though Sarah (Bell) is the ‘ex’ and most exes in films are made out to be the villains, Segel says he didn’t go that direction when writing the script. “As the movie progresses, you start to see of course she left this guy. He’s a mess. Drunk all the time and lost all his ambition. I think it’s neat because at the beginning you always side with the person who’s been cheated on, but slowly you start to see that maybe she had her reasons...”
The fictional Sarah Marshall is an actress who plays a detective on TV. “She’s on a show that’s called Crime Scene: The Scene of the Crime. She plays a young detective along with Billy Baldwin as her partner,” revealed Segel. “I think originally it was a sitcom that she was on and we decided you’ve seen that before. The new trend are those crime shows, so we switched it up. Writing the fake scenes for the crime show was especially fun.”
Another fun part of working on Forgetting Sarah Marshall was traveling to Hawaii to shoot the film. “My first thought was, ‘Where is a fun place to shoot a movie?’ It was really fun to write it there too. As soon as I sold the pitch, I rented a house in Hawaii for a month and went and finished it out there. It was awesome.”
But Segel wouldn’t go as far as to claim everything about the film and working in Hawaii was ‘awesome’. The actor/writer, who is afraid of heights, recalls being absolutely terrified to film a scene in which he’s hanging from a cliff. “Even thinking about it terrifies me still,” joked Segel. “They put me on this tension wire, I’m hanging from the side of this cliff and at the end I’m supposed to launch myself off and just hang from this wire. They’re like, ‘Just trust the wire. Trust your equipment,’ and that’s bulls--t. I’m sorry. It’s like someone telling you, ‘Oh, this spider has been defanged. Don’t worry, it can crawl all over you.’ If you’re scared of spiders, I don’t care if it’s been defanged. Same with the heights. Wire did not help at all.”
Segel can laugh now about how the stuntmen teased him while he was working with the wires. “They did a great job and all that, but they were also kind of razzing me a little bit because they’re all like brave stuntmen and I’m, like, me. So I’d be hanging from the wire shaking and they wouldn’t be hooked up at all. They’d kind of just like repel down on a rope and be like, ‘It’s fine, look,’ and just hang from one arm. They just had to rub in that they’re real men and I’m not. That’s basically what was happening.”
