Jason Segel Thinks His Freaks and Geeks Character Would Be Dead Today

Jason Segel has thought about where his Freaks and Geeks character, Nick Andopolis, would be today — but the answer is tragic.

“In my mind, he gets sent off to war and doesn’t make it,” Segel, 44, told GQ on Wednesday, December 18. “That was always like the threat looming for Nick, and that’s what happens to a lot of men of that generation and socioeconomic status.”

Segel kept that in mind when originally playing Nick in NBC’s short-lived series, adding, “That’s always how I was thinking of playing him. For Nick, the desperation in his character is that the alternative is not making it. That’s how he felt, like, ‘I’m gonna drum my way out of this.’ How sad, because you’re not going to drum your way out of it.”

Freaks and Geeks, which was developed by Judd Apatow and Paul Feig, premiered in 1999 and was set in a 1980s Detroit suburb. The series followed teenager Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini), who fell into a crowd of slacker “freaks,” and her brother Sam (John Francis Daley), who attempted to navigate high school life with his “geek” friends.

Despite not lasting long, Freaks and Geeks developed a cult fanbase.

“Even to this day, I think I didn’t want to admit that Freaks and Geeks was cancelled,” Apatow said during a 2014 talk at the Paley Center. “Everything I’ve done, in a way, is revenge for the people who canceled Freaks and Geeks.”

Freaks and Geeks helped develop Segel’s career, who has continued to book comedic roles in hit shows such as How I Met Your Mother and Shrinking. Behind the scenes, Segel was just as in-demand, with a writer for Freaks and Geeks previously revealing she had a crush on the actor.

“While I adored most of the actors [on Freaks and Geeks], I became especially close with Jason Segel. He played Nick, the drummer freak who is Lindsay’s love interest,” Patty Lin wrote in her 2023 memoir, End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood. “Only 19 at the time, he wasn’t the type that made girls swoon, but he was cute. He had warm brown eyes, a goofy smile and a tall, lanky frame — like, basketball player tall. In fact, he used to play basketball, just like his character.”

It didn’t take long for Lin to develop a connection with Segal — even though she already had a boyfriend.

“That was when I started having feelings for Jason, despite our nine-year age gap and the fact that I already had a boyfriend,” she recalled. “We talked about acting and writing, our career goals, his fear of fame, our love of privacy and the need for solitude. It was the kind of conversation that makes you fall in love with someone. Judd [Apatow] once told me he’d had a conversation like that in the car with the actress Leslie Mann, when they were working on the Cable Guy. They ended up married.”

Segal ended up politely turning Lin down before he started dating Cardellini, now 49. After their split in 2007, Segel was linked to Bojana Novakovic and later Alexis Mixter, whom he dated from 2013 to 2021. He is currently dating professional dancer Kayla Radomski.