In How I Met Your Mother, Jason Segel got in trouble for kissing co-star Alyson Hannigan — who played his wife, Lily, in the popular sitcom — for two reasons. First, because kissing him bothered Hannigan, and second, because it put him in debt to her.
Segel was a smoker when How I Met Your Mother began production, and Hannigan isn’t a fan of kissing smokers. “I cannot stand cigarette smoke,” Hannigan told Digital Spy in 2008. She said kissing Segel was “like kissing an ashtray.” She clarified that Segel did his best to minimize the taste by using “gum and mints,” but that it just didn’t help.
Hannigan explained that Segel tried to use her distaste of smoking as motivation to quit. “When we started the pilot [for How I Met Your Mother], he was like, ‘Get me to stop smoking, I’ll be your best friend.’ 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.” Hannigan recalls that Segel succeeded in giving up cigarettes for “about a year,” but that “he got stressed out, and he started smoking again.”
Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like the butts stopped the pair from remaining friends. When they appeared together on the The Talk during the lead up to the How I Met Your Mother finale, Hannigan openly wept at the idea of not working with Segel anymore.
