Kids, this is the story of how Jason Biggs turned down “How I Met Your Mother.”
The actor, 42, admits he made a bonehead move by rejecting the offer to play Ted Mosby in the ultra-popular sitcom, which ran from 2005 until 2014. Josh Radnor played the leading role instead.
“I was offered the role, yes,” the “American Pie” star confirmed while appearing on SiriusXM’s “The Covino & Rich Show.” “I was offered the role and it’s probably my biggest regret, you know, on passing. I think I was in a phase of, at the time — it sounds so, so obnoxious to say right now — but at the time it was like, ‘OK, do I want to do TV?’ I don’t know that I was quite ready to go that route.”
He noted that he was still making movies at the time and enjoyed only working “a couple of months on a gig” and taking time off.
“I passed on it and then, you know, two things happened very soon thereafter,” he quipped. “One, that show blew up. We all know what happened with that show. And two, I was like, ‘I want to do TV!'”
While he joked that it took him another four years to see a TV show with him in it — “Orange Is the New Black” — get made, he explained, “Big picture, I have no regrets. Right? I’m very lucky, very fortunate. I’m still here. That’s number one. Great. But yeah, if I had to pick out something I wish I had done differently, I would’ve taken that gig for sure. Absolutely.”
When asked if his “American Pie” co-star Alyson Hannigan, who played Ted’s friend Lily Aldrin on “How I Met Your Mother,” ever gave him a hard time about it, he said, “We’ve never really talked about it. I don’t know that she knows, actually.”