Rainn Wilson, the venerable Dwight Schrute on “The Office,” bidding farewell tonight after nine seasons and 200 episodes, remembers when they were just shooting the pilot of the show.
At the time, there was’t much hope that the Americanization of Ricky Gervais’ British hit would actually work, Wilson said. But he remembers one particular lunch and “this really intense conversation.
“We were like, ‘Could you imagine if the show got picked up, how cool that would be?’ And then someone else was like, ‘What if it went for, like, a season?’ ‘Yeah, what if we actually did a full run of this show?’
“And we were all like, ‘You know, it would change our lives, and it would be incredible and these would be the roles that we would be known for for the rest of our lives.’
“And it’s so weird,” he said at a big press day on set earlier this year, “now nine years later, like, that lunch coming true.”
“I remember when we shot the pilot,” Jenna Fischer says, “because I was a huge fan of the British show, and when we got hired to do the pilot, Ricky came in, and he sat down, and he talked to us for an afternoon, and we had lunch and got to ask him any questions we wanted, and I remember going home and thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh. If nothing else happens except that I got to have lunch with Ricky Gervais, this is amazing.’ And now look. It’s 10 years later and we made, like, a whole show.”
Steve Carell is the big character who has gone off to do other things. His character Michael Scott was a hit in the U.S. because unlike the U.K.’s “Office” manager David Brent, writer Greg Daniels says they change the approach to him.
“With Steve’s character,” Daniels said, “we kind of made him more three‑dimensional after Season 1 and put him into more of a tradition of American character comedy where you are rooting for him as opposed to judging him.”
Others in the cast could have left the show for bigger things, such as John Krasinski who has been tapped for several motion pictures. But he says he has resisted leaving the show.
“I think that it’s really simple,” Krasinski says. “I think that this show and this job is a gift, and we all knew it from the beginning, and we feel so lucky. It sounds cliche, but it’s totally true. This is one of those jobs that you don’t wait until your time’s over.
“You beg every single year to come back, and you hold onto the cuff of people’s pants until they bring you back. And so it’s more exciting than anything else to come back to this show and to be a part of this, and it’s just not something you give up on because it feels like you’re all in it together.
I don’t think I ever felt a moment of anybody feeling like it was an opportunity for bigger things, that if bigger things came, great, and we would all fully support it,” Krasinski says. “But to come back was the real treat and the real goal, and I’ve felt more honored to be a part of this show than anything else I’ve done.”
Daniels said it was important for him to return to the show for its final season, though his attention had been taken for a couple of years on “Parks and Recreation.”
“I hadn’t been full‑time on the show for a few years, and, you know, I just have a very strong connection to everybody. I feel responsible for everybody, and I couldn’t imagine a scenario where I wouldn’t be directing what was happening for the last thing. It happened to me on ‘King of the Hill; where I’d left it before the end and didn’t really participate in the ending, and I always felt a little bit like I wanted to try a different version of that story, and this was more emotional to me, this show, than any other experience I’ve had.
“So, you know, I’m in it now. And I’ll tell you, there’s some good things about it. It is very emotional. I am so happy I got a last turn at playing this game. When I took the show over, I said to Ricky and Stephen [Merchant], it’s like I feel like you’ve thrown away a toy that has enormous amounts of play left in it and I’m going to play with it.”
“People have asked me,” Wilson says, “‘What are you going to miss most?’ Well, it’s really clear to me, like, this is my other family. This is where I’ve been coming for nine years, and I love all these people. We’ve grown up together. We’ve had children. We’ve gotten married. We’ve gotten divorced. We’ve cried together. We’ve fought a little bit, and ‑‑ not like ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’
“And that’s really what I’m gonna miss the most.”