Alyson Hannigan Didn't Enjoy Kissing Jason Segel On How I Met Your Mother

Lily Aldrin and Marshall Eriksen — played on "How I Met Your Mother" by Alyson Hannigan and Jason Segel, respectively — might be one of the most popular sitcom couples in television history, but according to Hannigan, she absolutely hated kissing Segel. Why? He was a smoker, and she just hated it.

In a Digital Spy interview from 2008, Hannigan admitted that she really disliked kissing scenes with Segel, specifically because he smoked cigarettes at the time. "I cannot stand cigarette smoke," she said. "It's like kissing an ashtray and he's trying to be polite by having gum or mints, but it doesn't help."

Apparently, Segel had a solution ... but whether or not it worked particularly well is another issue. "When we started the pilot [for the show] he was like, 'Get me to stop smoking, I'll be your best friend,'" Hannigan revealed. She also said, though, that the bet didn't end in Segel's favor: "So we did this bet where he would owe me $10 every time he had a cigarette. After the first day, he owed me $200."

Finally, it all came down to Segel, who just went ahead and kicked the habit cold turkey — for a while. "So he said, 'I'm just quitting,' and he quit cold turkey for about a year," Hannigan said. "It was fantastic but then ... he got stressed out and he started smoking again."

Despite their infrequent kissing scenes on "How I Met Your Mother," which now makes a lot more sense knowing that Alyson Hannigan simply couldn't deal with Jason Segel's cigarette breath, there's no question that Lily and Marshall are one of the all-time best sitcom couples in the history of the television genre. The show opens with Marshall proposing to Lily, and though she accepts, she spends Season 1 worrying that she hasn't realized her full potential before settling down ... and she decides to go to art school in California, leaving Marshall heartbroken.

That doesn't sound like a great start, but the truth is that Marshall and Lily's brief separation — they reunite pretty early into Season 2 — proves that they're in it for the long haul. Once they get back together, the two constantly support each others' professional and personal journeys as they get married, buy an apartment, weather the death of Marshall's beloved father, and have a baby. A lot of sitcom couples constantly bicker and argue for comedic effect, but Marshall and Lily are real partners who lift each other up and aren't afraid to fight fair, which is a refreshing change of pace. As the stable couple on a show about a man desperately trying to meet the love of his life, Marshall and Lily anchor the story beautifully.

Happily, both Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan have been booked and busy since "How I Met Your Mother" wrapped up its nine-season run in the spring of 2014. Hannigan, who also made a name for herself on the beloved cult classic "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," hosted "Penn & Teller: Fool Us" after starring as Lily Aldrin and also lent her voice to the Disney animated series "Fancy Nancy." Most recently, Hannigan competed on Season 32 of "Dancing with the Stars" and took fifth place with her professional partner Sasha Ferber.

As for Segel, he's worked on films like "Our Friend" and "Windfall," but he's mostly stuck to the small screen. In 2020, the show he created and starred in, "Dispatches from Elsewhere," dropped on AMC, and he also appeared in HBO's now-canceled series "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty" as coach Paul Westhead. Notably, Segel scored a Golden Globe nomination for his starring role in the AppleTV+ comedy "Shrinking," which he created alongside Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein (of "Ted Lasso" fame) and in which Segel plays a therapist who rethinks how radical his treatment can really be.