12 Actors Who Hated Their Own TV Characters

10. Jason Segel - Marshall Eriksen (How I Met Your Mother)

The sheer repetitious nature of sitcom television results in many actors getting burned out playing their beloved characters, and How I Met Your Mother's Jason Segel is a perfect example of such.

Segel was reportedly dissatisfied with the direction his character, Marshall Eriksen, was going in during the show's later seasons, and his failure to commit to a new contract for the final season almost resulted in the show being cancelled. Segel said in 2010:

"It's funny—it's the greatest problem in the world to have. Jeez—I'm the luckiest guy in the world. But when your idol is Peter Sellers, playing one character for eight years isn't what you're trying to do. I don't really feel like I have that much more to offer with this character. Maybe if we got divorced or something—but that's not gonna happen. It's gonna be some iteration of, like, my TV wife opens the fridge, and she's like, 'What happened to the birthday cake?' And I walk in with a little frosting here [points to corner of mouth] like, 'What birthday cake?'"

Amusingly, the birthday cake gag was actually used in the hit comedy This Is the End, with Segel explaining the very same frustration to Kevin Hart, not-so-subtly throwing shade at his exasperation of working on the show for so long.

Considering how downhill HIMYM went in its final season in particular, though, you can't really blame Segel for both being a holdout and phoning in his performance during the last batch of episodes.