Josh Radnor says the cast of "How I Met Your Mother" is no longer close, comparing the nine-season bond to a college friendship that simply faded after graduation.
Radnor, who played Ted Mosby on the CBS sitcom from 2005 to 2014, was blunt when asked on the "Half the Picture" podcast whether the cast still keeps in touch the way they did during production. "No. Not even a little bit," he told the podcast.
For a show built around a tight-knit group of friends sharing a booth at a New York City bar, the admission lands with a certain irony fans will feel. But Radnor did not frame it as bitterness. He framed it as life.
Radnor offered a long, unguarded explanation of how five actors who spent nearly a decade together could simply stop seeing one another. He likened the experience to college:
"It's like college, where you have this very intense time together, and you can't imagine not seeing each other every day, because you've seen each other every day for so long, and then it just disperses, and you just go out and live your life."
He acknowledged that fans want to believe otherwise, that he, Neil Patrick Harris, and Jason Segel are still hanging out together in New York.
"People really want to believe that me and Neil and Jason are hitting bars in New York City together. They really want to believe that. It's a little more like family than friends, in that you don't get to choose your family. We were cast. We didn't choose each other."
The distinction matters. Radnor was not describing a falling out. He was describing people who were put together by a casting director, not by choice, and who went their separate ways once the job ended. He said the love among them is "quite deep and rich, and probably everlasting. But it's not an active love."
Radnor backed up the general statement with specifics. He said he hasn't seen Jason Segel in a "really long time," though they text occasionally. Alyson Hannigan attended Radnor's wedding in early 2024, and he said he has not seen her since.
Segel and Cobie Smulders did reunite professionally in 2024 when Smulders began playing a recurring character on Segel's Apple TV series "Shrinking." Both Smulders and Harris also reprised their roles with cameos in the spinoff "How I Met Your Father." But those were work obligations, not weekend plans.
Radnor himself has stayed connected to the show in a different way. Since 2025 he has co-hosted "How We Made Your Mother," a rewatch podcast, alongside the sitcom's cocreator Craig Thomas.
The drift did not come without friction during the show's run. In a March episode of the rewatch podcast, Harris appeared as a guest, and the two had what Radnor described as an "honest conversation" about tension that existed between them on set.
Harris noted he would sometimes wonder whether Radnor was "mad" at him. Radnor's explanation was revealing:
"Sometimes, I felt dismissed by Neil, but I was being dismissed by Barney."
He was drawing a line between the actor and the character, Harris played the brash, scene-stealing Barney Stinson, and Radnor suggested the dynamic between their characters bled into real interactions on set. Rather than resent it now, Radnor said he sees it as an asset.
"When I look back on it, I'm so delighted by our weird chemistry. I think that there was something in that tension that you're describing, that would come out sideways a little bit sometimes, that was actually the secret sauce in making that make sense."
"How I Met Your Mother" premiered on CBS in 2005 and ran for nine seasons before wrapping with a controversial series finale in March 2014. The show centered on Ted Mosby, voiced in future narration by the late Bob Saget, telling his children the long, winding story of how he met their mother.
The finale divided the fanbase sharply. More than a decade later, Radnor is still fielding questions about the show and its cast. His willingness to answer them honestly, rather than offer the standard Hollywood line about everyone being best friends forever, is at least refreshing.
Hollywood sells the fantasy that cast chemistry lasts forever. Radnor just told the truth most adults already know: shared time, even years of it, does not guarantee a lasting friendship, especially when nobody chose to be there in the first place.
