They may have brought the Apple TV+ original series to life—along with showrunner Bill Lawrence—but Jason Segel, who plays Jimmy, a therapist grieving the death of his wife on Shrinking, wasn’t hanging out with Brett Goldstein on set. Segel didn’t want to look at the Ted Lasso alum because of their characters’ “painful” past.
Goldstein plays the drunk driver behind Tia’s death in ‘Shrinking’ Season 2
Shrinking Season 1 kept the identity of the drunk driver involved in the fatal crash that killed Jimmy’s wife, Tia (Lilan Bowden), a mystery. All that changed in season 2 when flashbacks finally revealed Goldstein as Louis, or “Double D” (drunk driver).
Jimmy thought back to the night that turned his and daughter Alice’s (Lukita Maxwell) lives upside down. Initially, viewers saw a person’s outline as they were put in the back of a police car at the site of the accident. Later, though, another flashback showed their face and it was none other than Goldstein.
Since then, Louis has popped up in subsequent episodes of Shrinking Season 2. In one, Alice confronted Louis in a tense meeting at the coffee shop where he works. In another, Louis met a very surprised Brian (Michael Urie) outside Jimmy and Alice’s house.
Segal didn’t want to ‘look at him in the face’
The warmth between the Shrinking co-creators cooled when filming began. “It was tender up until the moment we had to walk onto set together,” Segel told TheWrap. The reason? Louis is “this guy who’s coming back into Jimmy’s life in the most painful way possible.”
“I didn’t want to look at the guy because I wanted it to feel that way,” Segel explained, noting he didn’t do method acting, but he tried to keep Jimmy’s feelings about Louis close when cameras weren’t rolling.
“I don’t carry it around with me, but this character that Brett was playing is the cause of a lot of Jimmy’s pain, and I just didn’t really want to look at him in the face,” he said.
Brett Goldstein wasn’t originally supposed to play Louis on ‘Shrinking’
In the same interview, Segel also revealed the part of Louis wasn’t Goldstein’s from the start. Originally, Louis was supposed to be younger.
“He was written a little younger before, and it was just a little bit different than Brett,” Segel said. “Brett and I are about the same age where we have a similar sensibility, and it just felt really exciting to play these scenes with him.”
“I think we always knew Brett would do something in the show,” he continued, noting the “plan” was for Goldstein to have a “lighter, kind of maybe comedic arc of a few episodes.” But that changed once Segel “said out loud what […] everybody in the room knew in their gut”— “that Brett should play that part.”
Lawrence saw Goldstein’s Louis as a mirror for Jimmy. “I wanted to do that with somebody who felt like a reflection of Jimmy. That when these two guys were standing face to face, they were looking at themselves. That was the picture that I thought was important, and I feel that way about Brett.”
A new episode of Shrinking Season 2 drops on Apple TV+ every Wednesday.
