Jason Segel and Mark Duplass discuss ‘Who Lives at Home’

For Jason Segel, 2011 was a busy year spent co-writing and starring in “The Muppets,” appearing in the raunchy comedy “Bad Teacher,” and reprising his role as Marshall in “How I Met Your Mother.”

This year looks to offer even more from Segel, where he’ll be reuniting with “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” director Nicholas Stoll in “The Five-Year Engagement” and Judd Apatow in “This is 40.” Yet it’s his most recent film “Jeff, Who Lives At Home” that may provide his most dramatic role thus far.

While Segel has played burnout slackers before, he said the writing-directing team of Mark and JayDuplass offered him something a bit more compelling. In an interview with Segel and MarkDuplass, Segel said to The Oracle that the role of Jeff had solid character foundations that still allowed him to improvise.

“So then when you got to the improving, it was so simple because the character is, I mean I know there’s a lot of complexity to him, but what I loved was that it was so simple, at least in my mind,”Segel said. “You just show up and be really regular, and so I think that’s what really drew me to it. Then the story, I think, is — it’s just unbelievable.”

Segel said part of the reason he admired theDuplass brothers’ script was experiencing a directionless period similar to Jeff’s during an “unpleasant out-of-work period, from like 22 to 25 where I was just waiting around,” which he felt theDuplass brothers nailed.