What is Jason Segel up to? It’s a question one is intended to pose during the opening of contained Netflix crime thriller Windfall, the actor poking his way through an extravagant Ojai house, pissing in the shower and rubbing his fingerprints off from door handles. But it’s also a question that many of us have been asking for the last almost decade of film, the actor fading from the comedy A-list and far, far into the background. It was weirdly Sex Tape – a film that also counts as Cameron Diaz’s last screen credit – that saw him pick up sticks and head to smaller fare (what on earth happened on the set of Sex Tape?) and even then, his choices have been sparse and minor (the few unlucky people who endured his teeth-achingly twee Charlie Kaufman-lite show Dispatches from Elsewhere will have also asked, with a more fatigued tenor, what is Jason Segel up to?).
We at least now know what he was up to during the pandemic, briefly at least, reuniting with director Charlie McDowell (son of Malcolm and his then-wife Mary Steenburgen), who’d previously cast him in 2017’s little-loved sci-fi indie The Discovery. Segel co-crafted the story for McDowell’s latest, a frustratingly inert little trifle, bizarrely purchased by Netflix for a rumoured eight-figure total, intended audience more of a mystery than the story itself.
