Jason Segel Is Tall

Warning: Contains spoilers for Season One of Shrinking

AppleTV+’s Shrinking, which returns for its second season today, has a provocative premise: Would clients actually be better off if their therapists decided not to lead them toward the insights that would improve their lives, but rather just told them straight up what to do? 

The show’s seeming position on this is somewhat inconsistent. Most patients are portrayed thriving when their unorthodox therapist Jimmy (Jason Segel) bosses them around. But Season One ends with therapy client Grace (Heidi Gardner) pushing her emotionally abusive husband off a cliff, after telling Jimmy about her fantasy of doing that, to Jimmy’s enthusiastic affirmation; he’s under the impression that she’s being hyperbolic, but still! You might think a connection to the criminal case might lead Jimmy to abandon his new proactivity; you’d be wrong. 

But, all of that is beside my point, which is to note the irony that a show called Shrinking revolves around a character played by an actor who towers over most of the co-stars he’s ever worked with, throughout his career. Jason Segel is one of the tallest actors working today, and we should talk about it more.

A fact we know, but that we often try to forget, is that most actors aren’t tall. Much more often, they are short, with big heads that, on camera, create the illusion that they take up more space than they do. If your male lead is going to be performing opposite a female love interest, it’s statistically likely that she’ll be well under six feet tall, so it’s more convenient for everyone if both their faces can fit in the same frame without her having to stand on a milk crate. It’s only when a site like Vulture actually assembles a chart of leading men arranged from shortest to tallest that you even consider how easily a Vince Vaughn could pick up a Daniel Radcliffe and carry the former Harry Potter around in his breast pocket. 

But Segel isn’t just tall for a movie star: At a reported 6-foot-4, he’s noticeably (if not alarmingly) taller than the average American man. And his size has been an intrinsic attribute for characters he’s played dating all the way back to his breakout role as Nick in Freaks & Geeks.

In one brief scene — opposite Linda Cardellini (5-foot-3) as Lindsay — he segues from sharing the backstory about a successful high school basketball career ending when school authorities found weed in his locker to a heartfelt performance of “Lady”; his loose-limbed physicality on the amateur choreography contributes to the overall impression of a human puppy who still hasn’t grown into his huge paws.

When the time came for Segel to graduate from supporting roles in movies like Knocked Up to the lead in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which Segel also wrote), he portrays the pain of losing the titular tiny girlfriend, played by Kristen Bell (5-foot-1). But it’s okay: When he attempts to get over her with a trip to Hawaii, another woman (played by Mila Kunis) is waiting to give him something to live for, and she’s nearly as tiny (5-foot-4) as the first. This press shot from the movie reminds us of the foot-plus distance between Segel’s face and those of the ladies he has to stoop to romance. (The less said about the fourth person pictured, the better.)

By far Segel’s longest-running comedy role to date has been Marshall, the sweet and goofy lawyer on How I Met Your Mother. Though Marshall eventually marries a woman — Alyson Hannigan’s Lily — who’s only 11 inches shorter than he is rather than a full foot or more, his height is still an unignorable component of his character. Slapstick comedy is, I think we can agree, just funnier when the limbs that are flying seem impossibly long.

But the show’s producers also wrote in the joke that while Marshall dwarfs all his friends in New York, he’s the runt of his family, with two older and much taller brothers. 

The story of Marshall learning to fight from his brothers hits different once you know they’re literal giants.

Though tall actors may face some challenges getting cast in productions full of average-height-or-shorter actors unless said tall actors are prepared to stand in a trench for all their scenes, there was one brief moment when they all got to commune together. HBO’s basketball dramedy Winning Time — a series adaptation of Showtime, journalist Jeff Pearlman’s nonfiction book about the Los Angeles Lakers in their imperial period of the ‘80s — probably could have used trick photography to fake like a whole bunch of short kings were tearing up a 5/8ths scale L.A. Forum. Instead, the production cast a dozen or so human giraffes to portray both then-current NBA players and the retired beanpoles who’d transitioned into coaching. Segel’s in the mix as Paul Westhead, a college English instructor turned Lakers coach who helped guide the team to the championship in Magic Johnson’s rookie season. It helped, of course, that Segel is a retired basketball player himself, having been known in his high school days as “Dr. Dunk.” 

Winning Time only lasted 17 episodes, abruptly closing its second season well before the end of the Lakers’ story — I don’t care about basketball in the least, but I was obsessed with this show, so in protest of its early cancellation, I refuse to learn the team’s actual history now — so it’s even sadder that a show so short-lived contributed to the breakup of one of comedy’s great partnerships, between Will Ferrell and Winning Time EP Adam McKay (6-foot-5). Maybe McKay didn’t want to cast Ferrell as Lakers owner Jerry Buss because, at 6-foot-3, he was too tall.

In Shrinking, Segel’s height doesn’t inform his character as much as we’ve seen in other projects, possibly because even though he’s definitely the tallest member of the cast, he’s surrounded by other California Redwoods: Ted McGinley and Michael Urie are both 5-foot-11, Harrison Ford is 6-foot-1 and Jessica Williams is 6-foot even. Williams plays Gaby, Jimmy’s colleague and friend, though their relationship enters a horny new phase midway through the first season. In the second, they have to stop and figure out whether their fooling around could be something more than that: It’s a question Gaby has to give some serious consideration, saying that Jimmy’s the first partner she’s ever had who was tall enough for her to 69 with. 

Is Jimmy a great therapist? Most assuredly not. But he is tall, so at least his advice comes from a great height.