Jason Segel discusses David Foster Wallace and ‘The End of the Tour’

Jason Segel knows he’s getting older, and he also realizes that what he found funny in his twenties just won’t cut it in his midthirties.

“It felt like consequences were more frivolous and things were fun,” the actor known for “How I Met Your Mother” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” told The Washington Times of coming to prominence as a young actor. “Not that things aren’t fun now, but you do start to have some sense that this doesn’t go on forever, and you want the things you’re doing to be a reflection of that.”

Accordingly, Mr. Segel, 35, primarily known as a comedic actor, felt the time was ripe for him to assay more mature roles that reflected his own growth and seeking to break out of the arrested development comedies like “I Love You, Man” that defined his twenties.

Mr. Segel stars this month in “The End of the Tour” as David Foster Wallace, the troubled author of “Infinite Jest.” The film, which opens in the District Friday, co-stars Jesse Eisenberg as Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky, who spent three days with Wallace during the final swing of his book tour for “Infinite Jest” in 1996. The two men converse, laugh and even come to loggerheads by the end of their time together. “End of the Tour” is largely based upon Mr. Lipsky’s book detailing those days, entitled, “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.

As Wallace, Mr. Segel presents a performance that is both reserved and tormented, caught somewhere between the mercurial author’s wishing to open up to Lipsky but also wary that the journalist may have his own agenda.

“Any artistic expression should be a reflection of where you are now,” Mr. Segel said. “That’s what good art is; it’s somebody laying bare their stuff in their medium. 

“I think, when I was 24, ’Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ was a really accurate portrayal of where I was at that time. That’s an age where a breakup feels like the world is going to end, and you walk around calling it ’the breakup,’” Mr. Segel said, laughing that baroque chuckle of his.

For his portrayal of the author and Illinois-based writing professor, Mr. Segel watched interviews of Wallace and read the gargantuan “Infinite Jest” over the course of 10 weeks at “100 pages a week — very regimented schedule.” Reading his works helped Mr. Segel both to understand the dark author better and get into character when the cameras rolled.

“If you read ‘Infinite Jest,’ he talks very, very eloquently about depression and suicide,” Mr. Segel said. “I think that’s one of the things that resonates about him is that he has an emotional vocabulary for things that we don’t know how to express.”

He said the script for “The End of the Tour” arrived just at the right time, as “How I Met Your Mother” was ending its run and Mr. Segel was seeking more adult roles.

“If I’m really lucky, I have 50 years of this career left. And I need to figure out what to do with that time that will be satisfying and sustainable,” he said. “And I had just a really natural life opportunity to make that choice because my TV show was coming to an end, I felt like the cycle of comedies I was doing was coming to an end, and I got to feel out what I should do next.”

Despite more serious roles like his turn as Wallace, Mr. Segel will continue in comedies, albeit perhaps with a more mature outlook.

“Your audience changes, [so] if you keep trying to do the thing that first made you successful, you’re not growing with your audience,” he said. “When your thing hit and you were successful, it is because you were a representative for your audience. But as you grow older, you start to look more like your audience’s vice principal.”

Mr. Segel laughed uproariously at the notion of feeling like an authority figure at his age, but the vice principal metaphor was apt, he said.

“A few years ago, when I went to the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, you could tell when they announced me, they might as well have said, ‘And now your pediatrician.’”

Public and private personas

Mr. Segel, himself a screenwriter, called writing a “friend,” as well as a way to both connect with Wallace and allow himself greater creative freedom in his acting career. He terms this approach the “Albert Brooks model.”

“[If] no ones’ going to hire me to do this stuff, I’m going write it myself,” Mr. Segel said. “As an actor, you’re an actor for hire for the most part until you learn to write your own material, and that is when all of a sudden you don’t need to ask permission. Because if the thing I write is good enough, and you think it will make you money, then you’re going to make it, so all of a sudden I have some power back in my hands.”

Motifs of writing, personae and trust run through “The End of the Tour.” Mr. Eisenberg, as David Lipsky, dances between admiration for his subject while awaiting the prime opportunity to inquire about Wallace’s suicide attempt and his alleged heroin usage.

“I think [Wallace] was going through something right then and there, something vital that he was actually looking forward to talking about with this guy,” Mr. Segel said of his on-screen avatar, “and he kept getting stopped along the way to his point. And I feel like David Foster Wallace wanted to talk about these existential issues, [but] David Lipsky wanted to talk about heroin.”

The understated tension between the two men threatens to boil over several times during the film, which Mr. Segel likens to “a compressed-time platonic” relationship.

“It’s the cycle of a friendship in a very [short] time, so everything is more weighty,” he said. “It does follow the pattern of a romantic relationship, but I think there’s a heightened intimacy because of the compressed time.”

The film’s Midwestern winter setting also elevates that sense of intimacy, Mr. Segel feels.

“Cold is a huddle-up temperature, whereas heat is a spread-out temperature,” he said. “And so I think there’s a forced intimacy to the fact that it’s -15 degrees. That’s when you’re bundled up.”

Of his on-screen partner, Mr. Eisenberg, Mr. Segel directed praise, likening their collaboration to a tennis match, of “two people playing both to each other and against each other. You’re dependent on each other to keep the volley alive, but you still want to win the point.

“I hadn’t thought of it until this interview,” he added with a smile.

The strain of being followed around by a reporter for several days clearly takes a toll not only on Wallace’s patience but also on Lipsky’s state of mind in the film. Of Lipsky’s perhaps overly fawning relationship to Wallace, Mr. Segel nods, acknowledging the kinship between Wallace’s iffy relationship with the media and his own contemporary status as a movie star in the 21st century.

“I’m in a new generation of media,” Mr. Segel said of the epoch of Twitter and Facebook. “There is the type of interviewer who comes in and hopes I’m going to say something dumb so that can be their click — that click they need so badly.

“And so what David Foster Wallace is doing in this movie is … they’re having what seems like a friendly conversation, and all of a sudden David Lipsky asks, ‘Oh, was that in your suicide watch?’ And you see something change in [Wallace] where all of a sudden he’s aware, this guy’s … intentions are not what [he] signed up for. And I have three more days with this.

“I’m able to keep up the ’don’t say something dumb’ meter for 20 minutes at a time, but I couldn’t do it for three days,” Mr. Segel said, again laughing.

Despite acknowledging the reality of his calendar years and his maturity, Mr. Segel still finds time to be silly. On Rush’s current 40th anniversary tour, the Canadian rockers show footage behind them of Mr. Segel and his “I Love You, Man” co-star, Paul Rudd, rocking out and lip-syncing to Rush lyrics.

In the 2009 bromance, the two actors played rabid Rush fans.

“They wrote us saying, ’Would you guys be willing to do this video?’” Mr. Segel, a self-taught musician, said of the Toronto threesome. “There was no question in our minds. So Rudd happened to be flying into L.A., and we met up in a hotel room and spent about two hours filming ourselves listening to Rush, and we had such a good time. Oh my god, we had a blast.”

When asked if the title of a theoretical sequel would be “I Love You, Man 2” or “I Love You 2, Man,” Mr. Segel smiles, offering only, “If there ever is a sequel, I think it would be called neither of those.”

Hedging, he adds, “I think I do know what it would be called, but I can’t reveal it.”