Tragic Details About How I Met Your Mother Star Josh Radnor

Josh Radnor wears a lot of different hats in his personal and professional lives. He's a husband and a dog dad; he's also a writer, director, actor, and touring musician. Radnor's career spans decades and art forms, but there's one piece of work that he'll forever be associated with: "How I Met Your Mother." Radnor played Ted Mosby, the storyteller narrating the show's impossibly long timeline to his children, and for millions of fans, that's who he'll also be.  

The ending of "How I Met Your Mother" left the fanbase torn, but people still passionately love the show years later. It's something that Radnor can't really get away from. The series completely transformed Radnor's career, but "How I Met Your Mother" wasn't necessarily a dream come true for the actor. He's talked extensively about how the show's incredible popularity is both a blessing and a curse, and he's now spent decades trying to work out his feelings about it. Part of those efforts have pushed Radnor away from Hollywood, and he's now working towards people recognizing him as more of a musician than an actor.

At first glance, Radnor seems like a TV star who has everything he could ever want, but when you look a little deeper, it's clear that Radnor is trying to dodge life's punches just like anyone else. Radnor's full story might not make you cry, but it's definitely got its fair share of tragic details.

Josh Radnor was still very early in his career when he was cast as Ted Mosby. Some of the best "How I Met Your Mother" episodes came in the show's very first season, and that's largely because Radnor and his costars play their roles so well right from the jump. That makes it even more surprising to learn that Radnor didn't have a ton of sitcom experience at the time, and he'd completely failed to impress the first time he was cast in a pilot.

Before "How I Met Your Mother," Radnor spent years trying to make a name for himself as a TV actor. In a 2018 interview with NBC News, Radnor opened up about the work he was doing leading up to his big break, saying, "I did some guest [starring] stuff, and then I started doing pilots, got fired from my first pilot ... I got replaced on this pilot on The WB called 'Off Center.'" According to Radnor, his firing was almost completely out of his hands. Radnor said that he heard one of the network higher-ups didn't like his face and wanted him gone. Tragic as that was for Radnor at the time, in retrospect it was just one more step taking him closer to "How I Met Your Mother."

Like many other actors, Josh Radnor's early career was marked by certain struggles. Thanks to "How I Met Your Mother," Radnor went from being fired off pilot episodes to starring in one of the most popular sitcoms on TV. Finally he'd achieved the major career goal that he'd set out for himself, but tragically he learned that success didn't solve all of his problems.

Radnor addressed an audience at InkTalks in 2015, and he explained that up until starring on the show, he'd really believed that becoming a successful actor would instantly make him happy. That belief turned into a crisis because, Radnor said, "The strangest thing happened, as the show got more successful, I got more depressed." Radnor found himself struggling more than ever with all the personal insecurities and self-doubts that had plagued him when he was still fighting to make it in show business.

In some ways, Radnor's new situation was even worse because he found it almost impossible to talk to people about his true feelings. Everyone looking at Radnor saw a man who'd finally achieved all of his dreams, and he didn't know how to express his lack of happiness to them. Eventually, Radnor realized that he needed to work on himself and his own sense of self-worth. It wasn't easy, but Radnor was able to pull himself out of his depression by reorienting his worldview, and his life has never been the same since.

Josh Radnor had some emotional struggles in the mid 2000s, and those led him into some bad habits. "Especially when 'How I Met Your Mother' first came on," Radnor said in an interview with Mayim Bialik, "for the first two seasons, I noticed my drinking had gotten really — it just, there was an uptick in it." Radnor said that he started having more and more nights where he couldn't remember going to bed. At the same time, Radnor found himself getting pulled into other addictions, like sex and pornography.

"I have an addictive personality. I just have the thing, I have the thing, 'more is better,' I have that. If something is good, more is better," he said on an episode of the ManTalks podcast. Eventually Radnor realized that he was using his habits as a way of numbing himself out. He said that he felt like his life was a car driving with its emergency brake engaged, and he knew he needed to make a change. Radnor was tragically wrapped up in his addictions for years and dropping his bad habits wasn't necessarily easy. Radnor had a backslide early on, but now he says that he's been free of his addictions for well over a decade. "Getting porn out of my life and alcohol out of my life were the two best excising things ... the two best I've ever done," Radnor explained on the podcast.

"How I Met Your Mother" made Josh Radnor famous, and his character Ted Mosby became a sitcom icon. Some of Radnor's fans were undoubtedly surprised when "How I Met Your Mother" ended, and he stopped playing romantic leads almost entirely. In 2025, however, Radnor told People that when the show wrapped up, he wanted to run as far away from Ted as possible. "I was really looking for roles that were not lovesick guys in New York City looking for wives. That was something I really didn't want to do," Radnor said. To this day, he said, "I still, sometimes roles will come to me that I can feel in the DNA, that it's a little too close, and I don't play those roles."

Radnor's complicated feelings about playing Ted-adjacent characters are easy enough to understand when you've heard about all the personal struggles he went through in the early years of "How I Met Your Mother." What makes his relationship with his most-recognizable character doubly tragic is that he doesn't always feel welcome to share his feelings about it. "When I've attempted to talk about this publicly, I've been charged with ingratitude or accused of spoiling a thing people love dearly," Radnor said in a Substack post. He went on to say that he has plenty of good memories of being on the show, but compared constantly being reminded of "How I Met Your Mother" to constantly being reminded of high school.

One thing not every "How I Met Your Mother" fan realizes is that Josh Radnor's career in show business goes beyond acting. Even while he was in the midst of working on the TV series, Radnor was working on some other creative pursuits. In 2010, Radnor made his directorial debut with the feature film "Happythankyoumoreplease," which he also wrote. The movie is a comedic drama following a group of interlinked New Yorkers all struggling with various personal and professional crises.

The film's debut marked a big moment for Radnor as an artist, but it wasn't exactly a turning point for his career. The movie had some success at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was the Dramatic Audience Award winner. The indie project didn't go on to become a surprise blockbuster, and unfortunately critics were not at all impressed with the film's wider debut. Radnor's debut has just a 43% approval rating from critics, and some of them did not mince words about their feelings on Radnor's work. Writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carrie Rickey called it, "A case of when bad scripts happen to good actors." And Wesley Morris of Boston.com said, "[The movie is] sluggish and trite and irrelevant in a way that suggests that the TV soundstage is a kind of hothouse that Radnor doesn't leave often enough." Directors have bounced back from bad reviews, of course, but Radnor has only directed one other movie since "Happythankyoumoreplease" failed to make a real splash.

Two years after "Happythankyoumoreplease," Josh Radnor wrote and directed his second feature film. "Liberal Arts" is a romantic comedy about a college adviser striking up a relationship with a student at his alma mater. Radnor didn't just work behind the camera on the film; he also played the lead. The movie performed quite a bit better critically than Radnor's debut, with both critics and audiences giving it a positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That wasn't enough for Radnor to start directing full time, and he didn't have another project lined up until 2016. 

That June, Radnor's fans learned that his third feature film would be a sci-fi story. Radnor had signed on to direct a movie called "The Leaves" written by Christopher Kyle and Kevin J. Walsh. Radnor would have been breaking into a new genre, but "The Leaves" wasn't entirely out of his wheelhouse. The story reportedly followed a man who finds himself somehow transported to an alternate dimension, where he seeks out his wife and has to re-convince her that the two of them are soulmates. Lionsgate/Summit was behind the film, but after the announcement that Radnor had joined the project, news about "The Leaves" fizzled out. The movie never got made, and to this day, Radnor hasn't directed another film. Nothing is guaranteed in Hollywood, and tragically Radnor learned that the hard way.

In the years since "How I Met Your Mother" ended, people have started wondering why Hollywood won't cast Josh Radnor anymore. It's always tragic when an actor's career doesn't carry them as far as their talent deserves, and fans definitely think that Radnor's time on "How I Met Your Mother" proves he can carry a show. Part of why Radnor's career didn't take off after the series ended is because he tried to get far away from it as an actor. Sadly for Radnor, none of his other acting projects have been nearly as popular as his time playing Ted Mosby.

Radnor's first project after "How I Met Your Mother" was the PBS historical drama series "Mercy Street." Not long after that, Radnor became the lead in "Rise," a NBC drama about a high school music program, but the network canceled the series after just one season. Since then, Radnor hasn't played a lead character in a TV series. As Radnor's TV career has faded to the background, he's also been more focused on indie films than big Hollywood movies. While some of his fellow sitcom actors started playing Marvel characters, Radnor began shifting his priorities away from acting altogether.

If Josh Radnor hasn't been keeping his schedule full of acting jobs, what has he been doing? Radnor spent years dedicating most of his time to acting, but in a way, all that work prevented him from finding his real passion in life. "The thing about acting is I'm saying someone else's words. I'm communicating someone else's thoughts and the older I'm getting, I'm more keen on sharing what's going on in me because I do have some stuff to say now," Radnor said in an interview with The Big Takeover. Radnor says that when he looks back at his early acting career now, he realizes he was chasing the wrong thing. "You start realizing that the only thing that really brings you joy is making stuff and collaborating with good people."

For over a decade now, Radnor has been expressing what he has to say through music. In some of his songs, Radnor writes about his anxiety around discovering his love for music so late in life, but he also plays around with the idea that he wouldn't have had nearly as much to write about when he was younger. It may have taken him a long time to find songwriting, but Radnor is making up for lost time. Radnor started the band Radnor & Lee in 2017, and they went on to release two albums. Between 2021 and 2023, Radnor released an EP and two full albums on his own, and he started taking his solo act on tour across the United States.

For almost half a decade, Josh Radnor has been pursuing a solo music career, and his first album started with a terrible heartbreak. Radnor and his girlfriend broke up around Thanksgiving in 2021, and just about a month later, Radnor found himself with no place to live. "For a number of pretty complicated reasons that aren't worth going into, I couldn't be at my house," Radnor told The Big Takeover. He went on to say, "My ex was at my house until June." 

Radnor had been living in Los Angeles, but at that time, he didn't have anywhere else to go in the city. Radnor knew that his parents were vacationing and his childhood home in Columbus, Ohio would be empty, so he packed up the car and left the coast. Radnor spent some time reeling from the breakup, connecting with old friends, and writing songs in the empty house. A friend of Radnor's invited him down to Nashville to record some of the songs he'd been working on, and Radnor's album "Eulogy, Vol. 1" came into existence.

It's been a long time since Josh Radnor was actively making "How I Met Your Mother," but that doesn't mean all of his complicated feelings about the show and his character Ted Mosby have gone away. In a 2018 interview with NBC News, Radnor talked about the strangeness of being known as Ted and said, "I actually love meeting people who've never seen the show because I feel like they're coming at me." As much as possible, Radnor wants to feel like people are seeing him and not the characters he's portrayed.

Online he's lightly ribbed some fans of his music who still refer to him as Ted, but he's not joking when he says in a post, "Normally I would bristle at the refusal to use my real name." In 2025, Radnor spoke with People about his somewhat frustrated feelings when fans approach him expecting to talk to Ted in person. Radnor put it bluntly, saying, "I'm a lot chiller with people who call me Josh than people who call me Ted." Radnor isn't trying to ruin anyone's impression of his old show, and he appreciates the "How I Met Your Mother" fans who know every small detail in the series. He just wants people to acknowledge that Ted, and all of his questionable behavior in the show, isn't real.