by Rainn Wilson
I absolutely killed the Dwight audition in front of Greg Daniels as well as producers Howard Klein and Teri Weinberg and waited for the phone to ring telling me I got the part. I was so excited and wanted the part just immediately handed to me.
And then the phone didn’t ring. For months. I was totally freaked as I heard they were auditioning every living and breathing comedy actor in the Western Hemisphere. I believe my first audition was in November, but I wouldn’t get a call back for a “network test” until January.
Normally screen-testing for lead roles on network television shows involves traipsing into a conference room filled with ADHD television executives who are furiously thumbing away at their phones, doing a couple of short scenes in the most nerve-wracking environment known to man, and then waiting an hour or two to hear if you got the part or not.
Greg Daniels, our exceptionally bright creator/show-runner, did things completely differently. The pilot for The Office was to be shot on a soundstage but in reverse. We would shoot the scenes in the upstairs production offices and prepare for the shooting down in the giant soundstages below. This had never been done before in the history of Hollywood, I believe.
It was up in those drab offices above the enormous stages, over the course of a weekend, that Greg, our keen director Ken Kwapis, and the other producers held the final auditions for the finalists. It was there that I would first work with Jenna Fischer, John Krasinski, and Steve Carell.
There were five or six people testing for each of the major roles. The producers mixed and matched all of us over the course of a weekend in scripted scenes as well as improvised ones.
There were some really interesting and talented actors, but the only scenes I really remember doing were with Jenna and John, who were absolutely adorable and hysterical in the roles. I remember thinking that they WERE Jim and Pam. They WERE the characters, effortless and charming as all get-out.
The other actresses were kind of nervous and flustered in the waiting room, but Jenna just sat there, reading Wired, a John Belushi biography. I remember asking her about the book and her offhandedly saying something about how it was a book Pam would probably be reading.
John was SUPER young back then (seventeen? twelve?) and had a fun, exuberant energy that was really positive and infectious. The funny thing was that the NBC New York casting agent told his manager that John was only right for the character of Dwight and insisted that he would only bring him in for that role. John rightfully refused to go in for Dwight and kept trying to get an audition for Jim. Eventually, of course, they relented and allowed John to try out for Jim Halpert, and the rest is history. We did some mix-and-match, scripted audition scenes, and then came the fun part: the improvisations.
I remember doing an improv with Jenna where Greg instructed me to let her know that if she was breaking up with Roy, I was available to date.
I was off to the races. I knelt in REALLY close to her (too close, creepy) and started telling her about my girlfriend, Regina, who was stationed in Kuwait City, and how much I missed her. I went on and on in a really hushed, conspiratorial way, and Jenna just sat there with an impossibly pained expression on her blank, lovely face. I let her know that I was a good sympathetic shoulder to lean on if she ever wanted to talk about her problems with Roy and with men in general, and that we should go out sometime and get a smoothie.
Here was the most brilliant thing about this improvisation: not my silly prattling on, but the fact that Jenna said almost nothing. Many actors when improvising believe that talking more is the key to being more interesting and/or funny. The very best improvisers have the ability to use silence and understand that less is more. Most actors in her situation would probably have started babbling and trying to get some jokes in. Not Jenna. She bravely just sat there looking disgusted, polite, sweet, and constipated all at the same time. I knew that she was going to be Pam.
For YEARS afterward the writers talked about giving Dwight a former girlfriend who had been stationed in Kuwait City and would come back to town and butt up against Angela. I begged them to cast Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica in the potential role. It never quite happened. But the card with the idea written on it, based off of the improvisation from my audition, hung on the wall in the writers’ room for years and years.
During this endless and incredibly fun audition process, I got to do a number of improvs with John Krasinski. It was a blast and we had amazing combative chemistry right from the start. We did a scene where he had to ask me to mind his phone while he went to the bathroom (I refused, of course, infuriating him). And another where he generously gave me a glass of water (which I was terrified of and paranoid about to an impossible degree). Our characters butted heads in a visceral, exciting way from the very beginning of our coming together at that now-famous desk clump.
(To the very end there was no one I had better chemistry with than John. As different as we are as people, there was a strange, almost psychic rapport we had while acting. We would often know exactly what the other was going to do and say, and play off of it. I also really appreciated the working relationship in that we could direct each other without any ego. We would often give each other lines to try out and little comic bits to play. Some of Dwight’s funniest moments came actually from the fantastic brain of John Krasinski.)
All I remember about working with Steve at the audition was an improvisation where he was taking me to task for borrowing his coffee cup and leaving it dirty on his desk. I denied it, of course, and that’s when he told me with disgust and venom that he had found OVALTINE in the cup! I started laughing and I couldn’t stop. They had to end the scene right then and there.
Later I found out that I was the only person the producers submitted to the network for approval for the role. Soon thereafter I was cast as Dwight and my life was transformed.
In one of the oddest meetings of my life, Greg Daniels called me and took me out for coffee. He had a very strange acting note. He told me in a very diplomatic way that he loved my acting during the improvs and he liked my acting much less in the scripted scenes. I was a bit puzzled by this. Then I got a bit panicked. Could I lose the role because I improvised well but seemed less interesting while acting scripted lines? I tried to act cool and called our great producer Howard Klein and asked to see the audition tapes. I went into his office and furiously studied my scenes, both improvised and scripted, searching for what Greg might have been talking about. And there it was, right on the crummy video. In the improvised scenes my focus was on the scenes themselves and on the actor I was working with and not on the lines, while in the scripted scenes occasionally there were times when the scenes seemed scripted, where the lines felt acted, a bit forced, a bit purposeful. I learned a very interesting and valuable lesson in this process. This documentary that was filming the characters at Dunder Mifflin was simply capturing the behavior of the workers there. This is how the acting needed to feel. Not deliberate or planned in any way at all. The lines, as scripted, needed to feel completely UNscripted, natural, off-the-cuff, as if the characters were in fact making them up on the spot.
The greatest compliment we ever got as a cast—and we got it all the time—was in the form of a question: “How many of the lines are improvised?” Or “It feels like the whole show is improvised at times.” This is a testament to the cast’s acting ability. No matter what the venue—film, theater, or TV—good acting should really feel improvised all the time, so that you don’t notice the lines are prewritten. This is also a tremendous compliment to our writers, who wrote such natural-sounding lines that resonated with tremendous absurdity at the same time.
(Note: The answer to the above question is that once we got the lines as scripted we would improvise our way through scenes, trying out different “alt” lines and seeing where else we could try to mine some comedy. Many cast members never improvised, but most of us would, especially Steve, the grand master of ad-libbing. I w
ould say in the end, in the final cut, the show ended up being about 75 percent scripted. Remember, the writers were also the producers on the show and oversaw the editing process, fighting all the way for the lines they had written to stay in the edit. Had the actors been overseeing the editing process the show might have been 50 percent scripted and the rest improvised.)
After we were all cast on the show, me, Steve, John, and Jenna went out for lunch at a nondescript little sandwich place down the street from the studio. We had a conversation that, grandiose as it may sound, is etched into all of our minds. We giddily discussed the very real possibility that this show could go on for eight years and that it would change the course of our lives and how these parts we were about to undertake would most likely be our most defining roles. “Just think about what we’re getting into; the journey we’re about to go on could be AMAZING,” I remember saying. I remember Steve, who was just coming off of doing Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, saying, “Of all the roles I’ll end up doing and all the films I may shoot, I believe that Michael Scott may be the role I’ll always be most known for.” It was one of those moments when our destiny was seen with complete clarity, like a country road from a hot-air balloon. And all while eating a tuna sandwich.
Chapter 15
ALMOST FAMOUS 2
—
It was eight a.m. on the first day of shooting and the entire cast of The Office assembled in the “bull pen,” the main work area of Dunder Mifflin. Ken and Greg had the idea to create a real workplace on our set. We all showed up for work in character, cameras capturing our every move. We then improvised our work lives: sold paper, made phone calls, sent faxes, did desk work. Ken wanted to create the relentless banality of work in an office like Dunder Mifflin. We would do this routine for about half an hour every single morning while filming the pilot, and the “B roll” we shot during those times was used in the title sequence and throughout the course of the show. This helped ground us all in the early days in the fact that this was a REAL work space and not the set of a television sitcom.
Shooting the pilot was a real pleasure. It was relaxed and collaborative, much like the rest of The Office would end up being. We knew we had something really unique and special on our hands. Then the trouble started.
After we did the pilot we didn’t hear anything from NBC for a long, long while. When the network announced what shows it was picking up, ours was not on the list. This was terrifying and depressing. All that work. All that waiting. The part I had coveted so passionately, gone. That amazing cast that Greg had assembled. We were devastated.
Then, at the very last minute, Kevin Reilly, the head of NBC at the time (now the head of TBS and TNT), called Greg Daniels and told him that they were going to pick up five additional episodes. (Most television shows are picked up for thirteen.)
At the last second we were rescued from the dustbin of television non-history. Excited, a bunch of us flew to New York the next day for the “upfronts,” the big television conference with the advertisers where networks splashily announce their fall shows.
Jeff Zucker, the head of all of NBC Universal at the time (now the head of CNN), was never a fan of our show. He just didn’t get the humor and didn’t think it would find an audience. In fact, at one point in the development process he decided The Office should be a multicamera sitcom (like Friends or, better comparison, NewsRadio). Greg Daniels immediately said that he would quit the project if that were the case and the show was back on track to be a single-camera mockumentary. Kevin Reilly and the other NBC execs who believed in us had an uphill battle to fight to try to get us on the air.
It also didn’t help that we were one of the lowest-testing pilots in NBC history. Right down there with Seinfeld. The test audiences HATED us.
(For those of you who don’t know, TV pilots are screened for a test audience, who are given these funny little dials. They can turn the dials up when they’re enjoying something and turn them D O W N when they don’t like something. Then they’re interviewed and give the shows a rating. The television networks and studios say they don’t, but they actually put a great deal of importance on the numbers that come out of testing, and a show that tests badly stands a much poorer chance of getting picked up to series.)
Our show got picked up for five additional episodes in the spring of 2004, but we didn’t air until the spring of 2005. And then when we did, we tanked.
Everybody hated us. Our reviews were awful.* People either didn’t understand the show or HATED the fact that we had done a pilot that was 90 percent similar to the lionized British Office. I know this because I sat in front of my computer for hours reading all the online comments with a sad, long, diarrhea face. (I now know better than to do this.) I was called “over-the-top,” “annoying,” and “pig-like” on countless online message boards. The show was reviled as an ugly-looking, unfunny train wreck by some, and a blatant, pathetic, unfunny rip-off of the classic BBC gem by others. “Unfunny” was the common ground that both camps could agree on, apparently.
The reason we did essentially the same script as the BBC Office was a very simple, practical one. When you do a pilot for a television studio and network, they are notorious for meddling with the material. They give notes on every aspect of the script and shoot. They want control of the casting. They want the set design to be brighter and more “fun.” They want the story to have clarity, meaning, and heart. They water down the jokes out of fear of offending and do their darnedest to try to make all the characters “relatable” and “likable.” Occasionally a network can help a show. Most of the time, however, it degrades the original idea of how the show was conceived and makes it blander, more palatable, boring, and more like other shows already on the air.
This philosophy doesn’t really work for a show like The Office. The two main characters are purposefully not relatable and likable but annoying and difficult. The lighting, set, and haircuts are meant to be an eyesore. The jokes are awkward. The story isn’t really a story at all but a slight, realistic framework to allow the characters to live, breathe, and thrive. It’s purposefully unflashy and off-putting, two qualities networks and audiences don’t usually gravitate toward.
So, what Greg Daniels did was rely on a proven entity. He told NBC, “Hey, the BBC Office was pretty perfect so we really should just stick with what works, right? I mean, why change it if it’s such a classic?” The network had no argument for that and we stuck close to the original pilot. Greg didn’t want what was fresh, original, and odd about the great British show to be lost in an American translation. He also knew that in upcoming episodes we would have a chance to find our own voice. Which we soon did.
—
Our pilot episode got decent enough ratings, but we went WAY down after that even though the following episodes were some of the best we’d ever do.
“Hot Girl,” “Health Care,” “The Alliance,” “Basketball,” and especially “Diversity Day” were the episodes no one watched when they originally aired but some of the ones our fans would later consider classics.
We started as this big family of dweeby television basement dwellers, excited by the possibility of our show, and gradually, gratefully, our dreams would end up unfolding and coming true in front of us. I realize, looking back, that in this family we had a stable of the most incredible writers ever assembled. These writers would eventually pen dozens of our very best episodes.
First was Mike Schur, cocreator of Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He had just come off of being the head writer on SNL’s “Weekend Update” for several years. He was obsessed with baseball and politics. And comedy. One of the finest men you’ll ever meet. Writer of “The Alliance” in season one, “Office Olympics,” “Valentine’s Day,” and the Christmas episode of season two (all seminal, crucial, classic episodes). And eventually, he would become an actor, playing a cousin of Dwight, the mentally challenged Amish creepster Mose Schrute.
/>
(Funny story: Our show was starting at the same time the TV megahit Survivor was launching and Mike broke the story of “The Alliance” when the writers jokingly suggested in the writers’ room, “What would Dwight say if Jim came up to him and said, ‘Will you form an alliance with me?’” “‘Absolutely I will,’” was Mike’s immediate response in the room, and they knew the episode HAD to be written. Those two lines have proven to be perhaps the most evocative couplet of dialogue in the entire series.)
B. J. Novak was an incredibly young stand-up comic out of Harvard when Greg Daniels discovered him. I’ve never met anyone with a sharper, darker wit. He’s got lasers in his brain. He wrote “Diversity Day,” the episode that made everyone (eventually) sit up and take notice of what our show was capable of comedically. Besides writing and directing so many other classic episodes, he memorably created shallow Ryan the temp, whose rags-to-riches-to-rags journey over the course of eight seasons was one of my favorite stories of the entire show.
Mindy Kaling is a horrible person. She doesn’t deserve a paragraph in this iconic pantheon of writers. (B.J. writes most of her stuff anyway.) She’s an insufferable flibbertigibbet who is obsessed with fashion, shopping, Beyoncé, and cutting off the penises of the men she’s slept with and putting them under her mattress. She also owes me two hundred fifty bucks, a soy latte, and a guest-star role on her dumb new show. She makes me sick. I need to stop writing about her now.
Paul Lieberstein was the quiet genius behind the show. Besides playing boring, lovable, pitiful Toby, he eventually became our show-runner, leading us creatively in many of the later seasons. So many of The Office’s most memorable scenes and moments came from Paul’s twisted brain: crentist, Dwight’s speech, the Holly/Michael romance, the Michael Scott Paper Company, Prison Mike, Dwight’s B&B, “Abraham Lincoln said I will attack you with the North,” and many, many more iconic events.