A Crying Jason Segel Weirded Out the Muppet Performers

While Muppet fans are currently mad as Hell at Disney for scrapping the beloved Muppet Vision 3D theme park attraction, there was once a time when the Mouse House put a fair bit of attention and effort into celebrating the iconic felt characters they now own. 

Most notably in 2011, the studio released The Muppets, a big-screen reboot that found Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo and the gang (plus some human beings) teaming up to save Muppet Studios from an evil oil tycoon. It remains to be seen whether or not we’ll get a sequel in which the Muppets put on a big show to save their offices from the clutches of John Mayer and McG. 

One of the film’s human cast members was Freaks and Geeks star Jason Segel, who also co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Nicholas Stoller. Segel was already a massive Muppet fan, as evidenced by the puppet musical-centric ending to Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

The Muppets was clearly a love letter to the legacy of Jim Henson, and, not so subtly, an allegorically personal story for Segel and Stoller, about two nostalgic superfans looking to bring back the dormant Muppet franchise. But Segel’s childhood adoration for the Muppets ran so deep that he inadvertently weirded out all the Muppet performers during the production. 

Segel recently chatted about his career with GQ, and, after revealing that his Freaks and Geeks character, Nick, likely died offscreen in a vaguely defined military conflict, he went on to describe the process of making The Muppets. According to Segel, during the first table read of the script, which included both the human actors and the puppeteers who perform the Muppet voices, he was caught off-guard when large crates were wheeled into the room. 

“It’s time to start the table read, and all of a sudden the puppets come out,” Segel recalled. “And they’re not just going to do the voices — the puppets are going to do the table reading.” Segel also explained that he was “a little bit the boss” of the project, and didn’t really know the Muppet guys yet. 

When it came time for Kermit (played by Steve Whitmire at the time) to deliver his first line (“Hi-ho!”), Segel had a profound emotional reaction. “I burst into tears,” Segel confessed. “Like, I started crying really hard. And everyone’s like, ‘How lovely, he really loves the Muppets.’”

But that initial admiration for Segel’s connection to the Muppet characters quickly devolved into awkwardness as Segel’s weeping intensified: “It got away from me, and I started to cry (disproportionately) to the occasion. Like, deep sobs. And the looks of ‘how sweet’ slowly changed to ‘wait, he can’t be in charge of doing this.’”

“I think about it a lot,” Segel added. 

While one might think that Segel would feel embarrassed in that moment, it’s also possible he was already maxed out.