‘How I Met Your Mother’ had zero improv: star

Josh Radnor and Craig Thomas, star and creator of How I Met Your Mother respectively, opened up about the strict scripts in the show.

Taking to their podcast How We Made Your Mother, Radnor explained that the series needed to be “really tightly scripted”.

About a dance scene with one of the characters, he said, “It was choreographed to a T. I remember Jason being like, ‘I don't dance. I don't know how to do this.’ It was down to the tiniest movement choreographed. Jason might have been scared, [but] you can tell from the look on his face when he's dancing, he was having a blast.”

Radnor took the scene to clarify the implication that “Jason just started dancing, and we caught that. You can't do that. There's four cameras going. There's extras who are being corralled and directed by the second [assistant director].”

The actor added, “There's just - there's so many moving parts and pieces.”

“It was really tightly scripted,” Radnor continued, “I think the idea is like a Judd Apatow movie or [John] Cassavetes movie where they just kind of roll the camera and the actors just do lots of things. And maybe I'm robbing us of our own mystique or something, but How I Met Your Mother was a really scripted show.” 

RELATED: Ted was the villain in ‘How I Met Your Mother’: creators