Jennifer Morrison hits the 'Mother' lode

http://ausiellofiles.ew.com/2010/09/09/jennifer-morrison-how-i-met-your-mother-ted/

It’s official: Former House doc Jennifer Morrison is joining the cast of How I Met Your Mother as Zooey, the new woman in Ted’s life.

And she’s not just any woman. Zooey’s “the biggest female character we’ve maybe ever added to the show in Ted’s life,” exec producer Craig Thomas declared to EW.com last month. “This is a big arc—a huge arc. It’s going to be a little less date-of-the-week for Ted, which season 5 was.”

So, who exactly is Zooey? As I teased yesterday, she’s a rabble-rousing activist who’s hell-bent on saving the Arcadian, an old New York hotel that’s scheduled to be torn down to make way for the Goliath National Bank tower—which Ted just so happens to be designing.

Cue fireworks!

Thomas describes the Ted-Zooey dynamic as “very complicated and interesting.” Adds fellow EP Carter Bays: “This is going to be a big saga for Ted. [It's] going to be a big over-arching story that will take Ted on a journey that we’re really excited about.”

Although Thomas doesn’t come out and ID Morrison as the titular mama, he does concede that season 6 gets “back to the fact that Ted is the ‘I’ in How I Met Your Mother. There’s going to be a huge push forward for Ted on that search.”