Jason Segel tells fans in suburbs why he isn't afraid to take risks
A 10-year-old Jason Segel is ready to become a hero.
He's kind of an outsider, a kid who wears a Superman cape under his clothes. If anyone asks why, he simply responds, “Just in case.”
So when he's cheering his older brother, Adam, at his championship basketball game, and the team is down 6 points with minutes left on the clock, Segel realizes the time — his time — has finally come.
He rips off his sweatshirt, unfurls his cape and runs up and down the court screaming, “Go, Adam!”
His brother's response?
“That was the last day I ever wore my Superman cape,” Segel said.
He may now be a grown, 6-foot-4-inch adult who's traded his cape for leather jackets. But the actor, screenwriter and author still isn't afraid to take risks and still hasn't lost his childhood belief that “anything is possible.”
“I'm willing to be bad at something until I'm good at it,” Segel said. “And if I do have something that fails, I think those are the scars of trying. Trying is the thing, isn't it?”
That was a lesson he shared with young fans of his “Nightmares!” book series during two appearances hosted by Anderson's Bookshop in a Downers Grove theater and a Glen Ellyn school this week. Segel, 36, is promoting “Nightmares! The Lost Lullaby,” the third installment in the series he's written with Kirsten Miller.
Segel originally conceived of “Nightmares!” as a script with the characters played by his co-stars in the cult TV show “Freaks and Geeks.” Years later, Segel scrapped those plans while working on the 2011 reboot of “The Muppets.”
“Watching kids interact with Kermit and Miss Piggy made me realize that kids' imaginations are better than anything I could put on screen,” Segel told students at Hadley Junior High School. “So I decided to turn it into a book so you guys could imagine this story however you wanted to.”
It's a collaboration between the writer and the reader to make the story, Segel said, but the central theme of the series is about overcoming fear.
The first novel follows Charlie Laird, whose mother has died and father is remarried to a woman the 12-year-old thinks may be a witch. It's also a tale of sibling rivalry (modeled after the Segel brothers) and friendship (inspired by Segel's love of “The Goonies”).
The latest installment introduces a new girl at Charlie's school who faces gossip and judgment by her peers.
“It's about, ‘It's OK to be scared and let's talk about why,'” Segel said. “When I was your age and someone said there's nothing to be afraid of, I'd always think, ‘Well, I am kind of scared, so how does that help me?'”
Over his career, Segel, it seems, doesn't shrink from his own fears. The parents of his “Nightmares!” fans may know that from his, er, revealing scene in the 2008 comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”
And he acknowledges self-doubts when he set out to write the screenplay of “The Muppets” — Segel idolizes Kermit the Frog — with his “Sarah Marshall” director Nicholas Stoller.
The secret to dealing with fear? That willingness to try and even fail, Segel told his audience in Downers Grove. And that's what he loves about the misfits in “The Goonies.”
“It's like an inception or something. I believe anything is possible. Like those kids went underground. And they found One-Eyed Willy,” Segel said, drawing laughs.
“It makes me feel like when someone says, ‘No that's not possible, I think maybe it's not possible for you.'”