Josh Radnor Admits He’s Not Close With His ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Co-Stars — ‘Not Even A Little Bit’

Twelve Years Later, the Truth Comes Out

Josh Radnor is finally setting the record straight about his How I Met Your Mother co-stars—and the answer might surprise fans who spent nine seasons watching Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin behave like an inseparable found family. Twelve years after the CBS sitcom ended its nine-season run, Radnor admits he’s not actually close with the cast. Not even a little bit.

When asked on the Half the Picture podcast whether he was still tight with his HIMYM co-stars, Radnor’s answer was blunt. “No,” he said. “Not even a little bit.” But before anyone reaches for the clickbait headline, he was quick to soften the blow. “I don’t mean that in any dramatic way,” he added. “It’s just…”

The honesty is refreshing, especially in an era where every cast reunion is packaged as pure joy. Radnor’s point isn’t that there’s bad blood—it’s that the reality of life after a long-running show is more complicated than the fantasy viewers project onto it.

What Radnor Actually Said

The How I Met Your Mother star expanded on the dynamic during the interview. He and co-star Neil Patrick Harris—who plays Barney Stinson—recently had a conversation about some of the tension they experienced on set, which Radnor described as “fascinating and kind of healing.” He was referring to the HIMYM rewatch podcast he co-hosts alongside series co-creator Craig Thomas, which Harris guested on earlier this year.

With Jason Segel, it’s a softer distance. The two “send each other texts every once in a while when something reminds us of something funny on set,” Radnor said, adding that he hasn’t actually seen Segel in a really long time. Cobie Smulders has been on the podcast several times, but Radnor says he’s “seen her mostly on Zoom.” As for Alyson Hannigan—better known to plenty of viewers from Mom—the last time they met in person was at Radnor’s wedding at the beginning of 2024.

It’s not the dramatic falling-out fans might imagine. It’s just… life. The kind of quiet drift that happens when a shared work experience ends and people go their separate ways.

“It’s Like College”

Radnor’s framing of the whole thing is genuinely lovely. “I have love for all these people,” he said. “It’s like college where you have this very intense time together, and you think you’re going to be—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 gets why fans want more. “I think that there’s a yearning, especially when a show is so centered around friendship—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.” The show’s entire structure, after all, was built around a group of friends whose bond felt unbreakable, narrated by Ted Mosby to his kids across the years.

But Radnor offers a more honest reframe. “I think 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. And family dynamics come out to play when you’re in an environment like that for so long.” It’s a striking way to describe the strange intimacy of working on a sitcom for nine years—you’re closer than friends, but not by choice, and not necessarily forever.

Healing on the Rewatch Podcast

The rewatch podcast has been something of a reckoning for Radnor. Describing his conversation with Neil Patrick Harris, he noted that sitting down and actually talking through the set tension was healing. It suggests that the passage of time—and the format of revisiting old episodes—has given the cast a new way to process an experience that was, at the time, all-consuming.

There’s also a whole universe of HIMYM offshoots to consider here. The How I Met Your Father spinoff attempted to recapture that magic with a new ensemble, while the larger legacy lives on in the original series. Fans of the franchise have plenty to revisit, even as the original cast members drift apart off camera.

Meanwhile, several of Radnor’s co-stars have kept busy in very different corners of the business. Cobie Smulders has continued building a strong TV footprint, including a role in the The Lincoln Lawyer universe on Netflix. It’s a useful reminder that the HIMYM cast scattered into successful, independent careers—which is exactly the point Radnor is making about life moving on.

Why This Resonates

Part of why Radnor’s comments landed with such force is how rare this kind of honesty is. Television casts are trained to say, “We’re like a family, we’ll always be close.” Radnor offered something more textured and, frankly, more human. It’s okay to have deep love for people you no longer see every day. It’s okay for an intense shared experience to fade into a warm memory rather than an active friendship.

Jason Segel has built a career on exactly this kind of low-key warmth, from Forgetting Sarah Marshall to his more recent dramatic work. The men who made up the core HIMYM friendship may not be hitting those imaginary New York bars together, but they’ve each carried their own pieces of that chemistry into new projects.

The Takeaway

Radnor’s candor is actually a gift to fans. It lets us hold two truths at once: the show remains a beloved, endlessly-rewatchable ode to friendship, and the people who made it are simply people—with the same complicated, drifting relationships the rest of us have. “You also have love that is quite deep and rich and probably everlasting,” he said, “but it’s not an active love. Acting is like love affairs that you have, and then you move on.”

That’s a beautiful way to put it. The love is real; it’s just no longer daily. And for anyone who grew up with Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin, knowing that their bond lives on as something quieter and more reflective—rather than fake and performative—might be the most comforting possible outcome. Sometimes a found family doesn’t need to stay in the same room to remain real.

The timing of Radnor’s comments is also worth noting. With nostalgia-driven reunions dominating pop culture lately—from sitcom reboots to reunion specials—his honesty cuts against the grain. The entertainment industry has leaned hard into the idea that beloved casts are eternally bonded, partly because it sells tickets. Radnor’s willingness to complicate that story is a reminder that the on-screen magic audiences love is exactly that: magic, crafted by professionals who happened to be very good at pretending to be a family.

That doesn’t diminish the show. If anything, it makes the craftsmanship more impressive. Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin felt like real friends because the cast acted like one on screen for nearly a decade—and that requires genuine chemistry and skill, even without the off-screen closeness fans imagine. The illusion was convincing enough that viewers still feel an emotional pull to that group of friends more than a decade after the finale.

And in a way, that’s the perfect ending for How I Met Your Mother. The series was always about how the stories we tell about our lives—and the people in them—differ from the messy truth. Radnor living out that theme in real life, with grace and honesty, is almost too on-the-nose. He’d probably laugh at the symmetry, then go back to not texting his old co-stars, comfortably at peace with it all.