To Make Up for Not Doing More Muppets, Jason Segel Has Writen a Young Adult Novel Series

Before I really knew anything about Jason Segel except that he was in that show How I Met Your Mother that my mom really liked to watch (Freaks and Geeks is on my watch list, I’msorrydon’tshootme), I sat spellbound by an interview he gave NPR where he cheerfully talked about what he considered one of the dumbest, silliest decisions he’d ever made: as a young kid, just out of school, he’d decided that what he should really be doing with his life was not trying to get a job but to really buckle down on the completely serious, not a parody, puppet Dracula musical he’d always wanted to get made.

This was why, when his involvement in The Muppets was announced, I knew he was the person for the job. And it’s why, if he wants to write a trilogy of young adult novels based on an idea he came up with when he was twenty-one, I’m absolutely okay with it.

VHI reveals that at a screening of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (a movie where Segel uses some of his puppet Dracula ideas) Segel announced his writerly intentions, and that he would have done it sooner if he hadn’t made another one of those dumb, just-out-of-school decisions.

The actor-screenwriter-occasional puppeteer was encouraged to speak about his book project by director Jonathan Demme, who hosted a Q&A following a screening of the 2008 film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York on Thursday night. As Segel tells it, he sold the script for “super cheap” because he “didn’t know any better” back then. It ultimately gathered dust on the Hollywood shelves for eight years before he was able to buy it back for the same price. “As I got more successful I kept hoping they wouldn’t realize I was the same Jason Segel as the Jason Segel they bought the script from,” he joked.

Now that he’s got the rights back, the novel is naturally at the center of a publishing house bidding war. He gave no information on the series’ content other than “It’s about kids facing their biggest fears,” and that the books will be out later this year.

Man, I hope it’s a book where a girl has to choose between two handsome puppets to date.

(VH1.)