How Jason Segel Went From Apatow Bro to Master of Muppets

To hear Jason Segel tell it, his house is pretty creepy. Its filled with puppets, the 31-year-old actor and screenwriter says over dinner at L.A.s Chateau Marmont. Literally packed.His puppet jones doesnt stop there: He turned his personal fantasy of making a puppet opera into a Forgetting Sarah Marshall plot point, and he grew up acting out movies with puppets, a trick he still deploys to fine-tune material. I just really appreciate puppetry as an art form, he says.

So when Disney handed him the keys to the Muppets franchise after he pitched execs on a reboot, it was a dream come true. I told them, Im not concerned with toys and rides, Im concerned with the Muppets being the Muppets that I remember.'The Muppets, which stars Amy Adams and Segel (he co-wrote the script with pal Nicholas Stoller), features musical numbers, a new Muppet named Walter (Segels characters brother) and a throwback-simple setup: Their old studio is going to be torn down, and they have to put on a show to save it.

Segel is best known as part of Judd Apatows happily crass circle, but he envisions Muppets as a salve against cynicism: They never make fun of anyone theyre nice. I think theres a hunger for that at the moment, when the world has gotten so contentious. He takes a sip of scotch and chuckles. The other reason Im glad the movies being made? Before this was an actual job, I was just the fucking weirdo with puppets everywhere. Now its legitimate.

Watch The Muppets trailer here:

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This story is from the November 10, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.

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