'I am not an A-plus person that's like most of us, right?"

Jason Segel, the star of 'How I Met Your Mother', talks with Adam White about fleeing Hollywood, his return to TV and the true-to-life nature of his role in new series 'Shrinking'

- Adam White

For 10 years, Jason Segel was in one of the biggest sitcoms on American television. For the last three of them, he knew he had to get out of it. "They were a hard three years," he remembers, of his time as the big-hearted Marshall in How I Met Your Mother. "I was really, really in need of doing an artistic check-in, and it was no one's responsibility but my own."

That show (originally networked on CBS, but now available in the UK on Disney Plus), along with self-scripted movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets, catapulted Segel to late-Noughties comedy superstardom in the US. This was the era of Judd Apatow neuroses and the Seth Rogen-verse; Segel was the classically handsome, 6ft 4in giant of the group.

He seemed to have it made: total creative control, immense sums of money, wooing everyone from Emily Blunt to Cameron Diaz to Mila Kunis on film. Something nagged at him, though. "The show was fantastic. Making romantic comedies was fantastic. But I was really starting to feel bored of my own work. And that's not a good way to feel."

So, Segel disappeared, selling his house in Los Angeles and moving onto an orange grove in sleepy Ojai, California (population: 7,637). This was 2015, and he had a plan. He'd roam. He'd write. He'd absolutely not act. It was a retiree's dream, only Segel wasn't actually retired. What he was looking for, really, was silence.

"I have an unquiet mind," he says. "In Los Angeles, I never felt at ease. I've found that the very thing that makes you able to achieve something difficult, like the motivation you have in your twenties to get your foot in the door - that'll be the same thing that'll kill you. If you don't recalibrate once you've got your whole body through the door..." He lets the image hang in the air. "You need to ease off the throttle. I had to learn that."