I’ve just met Josh Radnor, and he’s already leveling with me. His photo shoot went well, but being photographed has never been his favorite part of being a TV star. When I suggest that most people would be eager to get their own GQ photo shoots, he shrugs. “I probably should be more like that. But I’m more interested in conversation.”

Radnor spent nine years as the star of How I Met Your Mother—the closest thing a post-Friends generation of TV viewers had to their very own version of Friends. He’s returning to network TV for the first time in four years to star in Rise, a new high school-set drama by Friday Night Lights creator Jason Katims.

With the premiere of Rise just days away, Radnor is ready to sit down for a long and extremely candid conversation about his life and career. "When someone asks me a question, I find it hard not to answer it sincerely," Radnor tells me. "I’m not all that cagey or ironic, and I believe in trying to communicate with people on the level. Which, in the wrong hands…" He visibly winces. "I can get creamed, a little bit."

If you learn one thing about Radnor from this story, let it be this: His sincerity is absolute. In conversation, he’s a thoughtful and earnest and almost painfully honest person—a risk for your average human being, and a big risk for a human being whose profession ensures that his every word invites a level of public scrutiny.

For the past decade, Josh Radnor’s life has been a series of active choices: what he chooses to do, but more importantly what he chooses not to do. We’re sitting in a quiet bar drinking cucumber water, because Radnor doesn’t drink. He once gave a lengthy and supportive interview to an anti-pornography group, saying that he "[stands] strong with anyone choosing to get porn out of their lives." In 2016, he even gave up swearing, in what he told The New York Times was an effort to diminish what he called a "resonance of negativity" in his life. ("Some cursing has crept back in," he concedes to me, laughing.)

This earnest, focused attempt to live a positive life came directly out of the early years of How I Met Your Mother, and a downward spiral—the kind that has engulfed so many young, promising, suddenly successful actors—which Radnor willed himself out of. "A lot of people try to lure you: 'Come here, drink this, look at her, she’ll talk to you.' There’s all sorts of temptations that offer themselves," he says. "For the first year or two of How I Met Your Mother, I was like, Well, I guess this is what guys in my position do. And it left me feeling really empty, and more than a little depressed. I had to reassess my relationship to alcohol, which is ongoing—I’ll go through years of not drinking, and then I’ll see if I like it again. And generally, I decide my life is better without it than with it."

"People will still come up to me and say, 'I just watched the series for the eighth time, all the way through.' And I’m like, That’s too much. You’ve gotta move on."

How I Met Your Mother aired 208 episodes from 2005 to 2014. During that time, Radnor wrote, directed, and starred in the films HappyThankYouMorePlease and Liberal Arts—but for nine years, his most visible gig was the sitcom. “I sometimes think of TV as my day job,” he says. “It’s the thing that keeps the lights on.” The day after the How I Met Your Mother finale aired, Radnor tweeted a note of gratitude to the show’s fans. The first person to reply to his tweet wrote, "You’ll always be Ted to us."

Nearly four years later, that well-intentioned message has an ominous ring to it. Radnor has said goodbye to How I Met Your Mother, but the show’s most ardent fans won’t let it go. "I almost never think about [the show]," he says. "It’s a weird thing, when you haven’t done something in almost four years. But people will still come up to me and say, 'I just watched the series for the eighth time, all the way through.' And I’m like, That’s too much. You’ve gotta move on. Or they speak about the show with such ferocious intensity and passion, and they quote lines that I cannot remember saying. And I feel bad, because it’s such a part of certain people’s lives. It’s almost like if you had relatives and they only wanted to talk about how you were in the sixth grade. And you’re like, 'I’ve done a lot of stuff since the sixth grade! I’m getting a PhD here!' I don’t mean to diminish it or say it was juvenile—but it definitely feels like it was in the past."