Friends forever! After The Office debuted on NBC in 2005, viewers quickly fell in love with the different dynamics amongst the cast.
The sitcom focused on the lives of office employees at a paper company named Dunder Mifflin in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The cast included Steve Carell, Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, B. J. Novak, Melora Hardin, Brian Baumgartner, Kate Flannery, Angela Kinsey and Oscar Nunez. The Office also featured Ed Helms, Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein, Creed Bratton, Craig Robinson, Ellie Kemper and Zach Woods.
The mockumentary may have wrapped in 2013 after nine seasons, but many of the cast members continued to stay in touch personally and professionally. In 2019, Fischer and Kinsey reunited to work together on a podcast that explored behind the scenes details about each episode of The Office.
“We were trying to figure out exactly what we were going to do, and then I was trying to make the corner of our guest room into my home office, and I had these three Rubbermaid bins full of photos and memorabilia from the show that I had been holding on to,” Kinsey, who played Angela, explained to Entertainment Weekly at the time.
She added: “I was getting really nostalgic going through them, and Jenna had come over and we were hanging out and I was showing her stuff and we were thinking about, ‘Well, it’s the 15-year anniversary.’”
For Fischer, the opportunity allowed her to revisit the beginning of her friendship with Kinsey.
“She wouldn’t stop talking to me, so I thought, ‘I guess this person is my friend?’ But after the pilot, we did not stay in touch, and there was about a six-month lag between shooting the pilot and the rest of season 1,” the Emmy nominee revealed to EW. “Thank goodness the show got picked up, because it was during the shooting of the rest of season 1 that Angela and I became best friends. It was during those additional five episodes where, I think even if the show hadn’t been picked up after that, Angela would have been my friend for life.”
The Louisiana native, for her part, noted that their connection grew after years of working on The Office set.
“We became friends for life in those first episodes. You have to remember after we did the pilot, to totally date us, there was no social media, we all had flip phones, so it was just a different time, where when you left a job you didn’t necessarily see those people again,” she added. “The first season was only six episodes, and it kind of felt like we were doing this one-act play that we didn’t know if anyone would ever see, and there was a real camaraderie in the cast because of that. I think it really was the beginnings of all of us being very close.”
One year after they found success discussing past episodes of The Office with their former costars, Kinsey opened up about how working together on a podcast differed from a TV show.
“There were people within our circles who were like, ‘Hey, it can be tricky becoming a business partner with your best friend. Are you worried about how your friendship will be affected?’” she recalled during an interview with Hello Giggles in 2019. “But we both felt really certain that we were gonna be just fine — and not only have we been just fine, but we’ve really, truly deepened our friendship. We have a whole new level of respect for one another and each other’s work ethics. Jenna makes me want to do better, and vice versa.”
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Scroll down for every time The Office cast reunited on other projects together:
