Muppet of a man: Watch Jason Segel revive his Dracula puppet musical from Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Jason Segel played Marshall on How I Met Your Mother for nine years, but a different role has officially become his longest-running character: puppet Dracula.

The actor and longtime Muppet enthusiast recently brought his puppet musical A Taste For Love out of retirement for a surprise performance at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles. Segel and a backing band performed "Dracula's Lament" live for the first time in more than a decade, and the second time overall, at a Halloween show at the venerable puppet institution.

In an Instagram post, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater explained that it helped Segel restore the Dracula puppet for the performance. "To get ready him ready for the show, our team worked hard to restore Dracula," the post caption said. "After a ten year hiatus from his last performance, Dracula needed some general care to keep looking fresh and a new gleam to his devilish eyes!"

Audiences first got a glimpse of A Taste For Love in the 2008 rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which Segel's depressed composer Peter Bretter writes and performs the musical after being dumped by his titular ex-girlfriend (Kristen Bell) and messily ending a vacation fling with Rachel (Mila Kunis).

However, A Taste For Love was actually conceived before the beloved movie. In 2015, Segel revealed that he wrote the entirety of the musical as a passion project during a "slow period" of his career. "I came up with the conclusion that the way I was going to jump-start my career was with a lavish Dracula puppet musical. I wrote the Dracula musical alone in my apartment and I recorded it," he said. "At this time I was smoking a lot of pot, if we're going to be honest about it."

After he initially recorded "Dracula's Lament" — the only snippet of the project Segel has publicly shared — the actor excitedly played it for Judd Apatow, whom he had worked with on Freaks and Geeks and numerous later projects. "I then drove to Judd's house with a CD that I burned for him," he said. "I played it for him. I remember it got to the end of the song, and Judd reached over and pushed pause and stopped it. And he said, 'You can't play that for anybody.'"

After integrating A Taste For Love into Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which Segel wrote and Apatow produced, the actor performed "Dracula's Lament" on the 1000th episode of The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson in 2009.

Additionally, after working with Jim Henson's Creature Shop on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Segel was inspired to pitch his vision for a new Muppet movie to Disney, which eventually became 2011's The Muppets, co-written by Segel and Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller.

A Taste For Love has stuck with Segel for decades. Earlier this year, while promoting Shrinking, the actor told GQ that he hopes to revive the project with a mockumentary special. "I have an idea that I've had for a long time that I just need people to be excited about doing," he said. "I would like to do a special of Peter Bretter bringing A Taste For Love to Broadway. Almost like what Lin-Manuel Miranda did with Hamilton, that special about the making of. I would love to see that, but for Peter Bretter taking the Dracula puppet musical to Broadway."

Watch Segel's performance of "Dracula's Lament" from A Taste For Love above.

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