Josh Radnor Says "How I Met Your Mother" Fans were Mad at Him for Ted's Actions

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Josh Radnor Says "How I Met Your Mother" Fans Got Mad at Him over his Character's Actions
by Wesley Stenzel
April 25, 2025


Josh Radnor 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 Ted Mosby 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.'"




Radnor also 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."




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.

"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."




Radnor 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."

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