Freaks & Geeks Writer Admits She Tried To Have An Affair With Teenage Jason Segel!

Was this a romantic near-miss? Or on the edge of Hollywood misconduct??

TV writer Patty Lin has been dishing the dirt! She dropped a new memoir on Tuesday titled End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood, telling stories about her days on Friends and LOST and everything in between. One story she probably should have kept to herself? One about working on the cult classic Freaks and Geeks.

Patty served as a writer for 12 of the short-lived series’ 18 episodes, and during that time she fell in love — and not with the hugely relatable stories of the kids growing up in the early 80s. No, she fell hard for star Jason Segel.

That was a problem for many reasons. The first? Jason was brand new to Hollywood — and just 19 years old at the time. She was 28. That’s already a little… questionable. Not the most egregious age gap we’ve seen in this town. But then you have the fact she was a writer on the show — not his boss but in kind of a position of power over him. And yet, she’s now willing to admit, she totally wanted to have an affair with him at the time! She wrote:

“While I adored most of the actors [on Freaks and Geeks], I became especially close with Jason Segel. He played Nick, the drummer freak who is Lindsay’s love interest. Only 19 at the time, he wasn’t the type that made girls swoon, but he was cute. He had warm brown eyes, a goofy smile and a tall, lanky frame — like, basketball player tall. In fact, he used to play basketball, just like his character.”

This is sounding a little like a love letter… She continued:

“It was impossible not to like Jason. He had a positive attitude and did his job without any complaints. Not only was he an intuitive actor but a budding writer and musician as well. He was also a pothead. That was something we had in common. While shooting [an episode I wrote called] Girlfriends and Boyfriends we sussed out our mutual interest and became stoner buddies.”

The writer recalled spending a one-on-one evening with the future Forgetting Sarah Marshall actor, admitting that was when she knew she had “feelings” for him, despite being so much older. Oh, AND she was in a relationship!

“That was when I started having feelings for Jason, despite our nine-year age gap and the fact that I already had a boyfriend. We talked about acting and writing, our career goals, his fear of fame, our love of privacy and the need for solitude. It was the kind of conversation that makes you fall in love with someone.”

On the way home, the pair stopped at a hotel so Lin could use the restroom, and that’s where she remembers getting (or at least considering getting) bold:

“I had a wild impulse to ask Jason to spend the night with me at the hotel where I had taken a leak. I stamped out the urge to kiss him and gave him a hug instead.”

It was soon after that when Lin noticed Segel clearly had feelings for his co-star and onscreen love interest, Linda Cardellini:

“Then I noticed Jason flirting with Linda Cardellini, the actress who played Lindsay.”

It was later on when the cast and crew went out to celebrate Patty’s birthday that she says she secretly made a wish before blowing out her candles that Jason would plant a kiss on her… But that didn’t happen. The following day, however, she took the leap and confessed her feelings to the then-teen. But he turned her down, mostly — he said — in consideration of her boyfriend. She wrote:

“I was crushed like a lovesick teenager. Maybe Jason was being honest, and if so, his moral code was impressive for a guy his age. But I had a feeling that whatever had been brewing between us was barely a blip compared to what was going on with Linda. And I was right: before long, they were a couple, their union deemed by everyone as cute and inevitable. Linda was beautiful and talented, not to mention a cool person. I never stood a chance.”

And that’s the whole story — thankfully for her!

We mean, imagine if they had hooked up, and that was the story she was telling! Look at the optics of it: writer convinces much younger actor to engage in an affair… Think if the roles were reversed and it was a much younger woman! Yeah… Something tells us she would have been better off never telling this story to ANYONE…