MOVIES

Brotherly Love

Talking with I Love You, Man star Jason Segel


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Published: Mar 18, 2009

It comes as no surprise that Jason Segel is the kind of guy who calls someone he's just met "brother." Whether on TV's How I Met Your Mother or in last year's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Segel exudes a loose-limbed dudeness, a sense that he's someone you could knock back a couple of beers with. That quality comes to the fore in I Love You, Man, where he plays the shaggy-haired yin to Paul Rudd's tightly wound yang.

Although it's ostensibly a buddy movie, I Love You, Man is structured as a romantic comedy, a courtship between Rudd, who discovers on the eve of his wedding that he has no male friends, and Segel, who revels in the single life. It's boy meets boy/boy loses boy/boy gets boy.

Tweaking the rom-com formula is something that appeals to Segel. "That formula is there because it works," he says. "What I think is amusing about the way it's been monkeyed around with is that it has all the elements of a romantic comedy, and all the elements of a buddy movie, so you're able to draw in everybody. I think we might have hit the sweet spot with our comedic witches' brew."

The movie's comedy plays off the discomfort Rudd's character feels in making plans with a male friend, pointedly contrasted with the cozy gatherings of his wife (Rashida Jones) and her girlfriends. "It's not the same dynamic," Segel says. "You ask girls how they met, and it's, 'Oh, I was walking down the street, and she commented on my shoes, and we just hit it off.' Can you imagine if I said the way I met Paul Rudd was he was walking down the street, and I told him I liked his slacks, and the next thing I knew we were having brunch?"

Instead, Rudd and Segel sublimate their desire to get closer into manly activities like basement jam sessions and Rush concerts, the kinds of things most grown women are too savvy to spend their time on. "For the concert, we populated the extras with mid- to late [thirtysomething] dudes," Segel recalls. "When we were talking to Rush, we were like, 'It must be weird for you to play a concert for all middle-aged men,' and they laughed and said, 'No, that's pretty much what our concerts are like.'"

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Read Shaun Brady's review of I Love You, Man.