Josh Radnor says ‘How I Met Your Mother’ fans blamed him for Ted’s actions

Josh Radnor is sick of atoning for Ted Mosby’s sins.

The actor reflected on receiving criticism for his How I Met Your Mother character’s actions despite having no control over the writing or direction of the show. “Maybe I’m robbing us of our own mystique or something, but How I Met Your Mother was a really scripted show,” Radnor said on a new episode of his podcast How We Made Your Mother. “That’s why when people want to get mad like around something Ted did, I was like, ‘Dude, I was contractually obligated to do those things. This is my job.'”

Radnor, who played the show’s protagonist for nine seasons between 2005 and 2014, reiterated that actors are obligated to serve the material they receive, not to change it based on their own preferences. “This is my job to be truthful and bring this stuff to life,” he said. “And it wasn’t my job to hijack the script and say, ‘You know what? I think [this] should really happen.'”

The actor, who penned the films Happythankyoumoreplease and Liberal Arts, noted that although he enjoys screenwriting, he never had much interest in contributing to the How I Met Your Mother writers room — a sentiment shared by his costar Jason Segel. 

“I write my own things, but Jason and I actually had this talk a bunch of times,” he said. “We love writing scripts. We didn’t think we’d be particularly good How I Met Your Mother writers. It came from the minds of Craig [Thomas] and Carter [Bays] and the writing staff. It was a very singular world that had its own rules and its own logic. And we were just inside that, but we weren’t the puppet masters.”

However, Radnor admitted that he was always intrigued by the writers’ process despite not wanting to participate in it himself. “It’s hard for me to watch things and not try to look under the hood and see a little bit like, ‘Oh, this is really smart how they’re developing this character,’ or, ‘This character’s coming back,’ and ‘Isn’t that a funny callback?'” he said. 

Radnor continued: “I’m interested in the mechanics, but I also, and I think I said this before, I’m pretty clear about what I’m on set to do. I was not there as a writer. I was there to be the actor, and I had my actor hat on. But I think another kind of subtle subterranean part of me was learning and observing.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly’s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

The actor also explained why the show left very little room for improvisation. “There’s four cameras going. There’s extras who are being corralled and directed by the second [assistant director],” Radnor said. “There’s just so many moving parts and pieces. Plus, it’s a 22, 22-and-a-half minute story that has 40 to 60 scenes in it that are choreographed and written just to be part of this functioning machine.”

However, there were occasionally moments when actors had the freedom to shake things up. “What you could do is kind of, at the end of a scene, there might be a little bit,” Radnore said. “There might have been a moment in rehearsal where you say, ‘Hey, would it be funny if, Ted did this?’ And you could negotiate it.”

Listen to the full episode of How We Made Your Mother above.