Comedy sitcom How I Met Your Mother star Jason Segel is now winning accolades for portraying critically-acclaimed author David Foster Wallace who committed suicide in 2008, in the new movie The End of the Tour.
Departing from the genre of movies he has starred in before, he said he was "very self-conscious about," stepping into the shoes of literary-genius Wallace, who was loved (often ridiculed) for his much-critiqued work including The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest.
The movie End of the Tour is directed by James Ponsoldt, and is based on the memoir of Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky who intimately interviewed Wallace for five days straight on highways, airplanes, voyaging through different states in deeply-engaging conversations in 1996.
Lipsky had published his interviews and intellectually stimulating time spent with Wallace in 2010 in the book 'Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself'', which won wide-spread literary applause for the brilliant conversations between the two authors.
The work was cited by The Atlantic Monthly as "far-reaching, insightful, very funny, profound, surprising, and awfully human".
Jason Segel told On Air with Ryan Seacrest that he had to work really hard to don the character of Wallace, by studying the author to perfectly fit into the role in what would be a tribute movie to the literary giant.
He even wore bandana to feel the inner persona of the man he was playing, and took up a diet of Hot Packs to gain 30 pounds for the challenging role.
"I was very self-conscious about it," he said. "He also wears a bandana all the time. I didn't want to show up on set and feel like I was putting on a costume. So I spent a few months - I actually moved out of L.A., found a little town to live in where I can sort of do these things without feeling completely self-conscious and be photographed."
It's an intimidating thing playing a real guy because he took his own life in 2008," he adds. "It's a sensitive issue and there are people who care about him and love him in varying capacity. So you really want to honor that and make sure that you're proceeding with a lot of love and empathy."
However, Segel quipped that gluttony quickly becomes unpleasant, while appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden.
'We were two weeks away from shooting and I had 15lbs to go so I put myself on a Hot Pockets diet,' he said.
'It was fun for a week and then every night feels like Thanksgiving night, you're just exhausted and you have no vital energy,' he said.
Out in theatres now, The End of the Tour, is a conversation on philosophy of life and relationships, in which Wallace is said to be honest and revealing, and at the same time holding in a lot of things, as he is super cautious of the reckless misinterpretations of his statements and work by journalists.
Segel made it a point to listen to the taped conversations between Lipsky and Wallace during the five days of intense dialogue, which he kept doing "compulsively" for about four months, according to San Jose Mercury News.
"I had almost the entire conversation verbatim to listen to," he said. "So it helped inform me not just what David Foster Wallace sounded like, but also the tone of the conversation."
Segel said it did justice to the film because "(the interview) was more fun than I pictured, and that's an important thing to take into the movie."
