"I was contractually obligated" — Josh Radnor recalls the time his fans got mad over his character's actions

How I Met Your Mother alum, Josh Radnor, has been receiving criticism for the actions of his character, Ted Mosby, in the popular sitcom.

Radnor played one of the leads in How I Met Your Mother for nine long seasons. The show that premiered in September 2005 ran successfully till 2014. The main cast of the series also included Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, Alison Hannigan, and Jason Segel.

Radnor, on his podcast How We Made Your Mother, which he co-hosts with one of the creators of HIMYM, Craig Thomas, reflected and discussed his character, Ted Mosby's actions, and confessed that he had no control or authority over the show's writing or direction process.

Josh, on the recent episode of his podcast, said:

"Maybe I'm robbing us of our own mystique or something, but How I Met Your Mother was a really scripted show. 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.'"

Besides being an actor, Josh Radnor is also a screenwriter and a director. He has written and directed films like Liberal Arts starring Elizabeth Olsen, Zac Efron, and Richard Jenkins, and Happythankyoumoreplease featuring Kate Mara, Zoe Kazan, and Malin Akerman.

Despite being a writer and director himself, Radnor was never interested or inclined towards contributing when it came to the writing or directorial process of How I Met Your Mother. It's not only him, but even Jason Segel shared the same sentiment. Radnor added:

"I write my own things, but Jason and I actually had this talk a bunch of times. 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."

However, Radnor, while talking about the show and his character in it, repeatedly said that their only duty was to focus on the acting part, as they were obligated to serve the script they received. They were not in a position to change the script according to their wish. Radnor said:

"This is my job to be truthful and bring this stuff to life. And it wasn't my job to hijack the script and say, 'You know what? I think [this] should really happen.'"

Josh Radnor was always interested in the writers' process

On his podcast, the 50-year-old actor/director confessed that during the production of How I Met Your Mother, he was always interested in the writers' process, but never really thought about contributing to it. The All Happy Families actor said:

"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?'"

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Radnor further continued, saying:

"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."

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