On The Office, Brian Baumgartner’s Kevin Malone and Angela Kinsey’s Angela Martin never got along; Kevin constantly exasperated Angela in the accountants’ corner. But in real life, Angela and Brian are great friends, and on this episode of The Office Deep Dive, that friendship is obvious as they get into what she was doing before she was cast on The Office and what her audition experience was like, the multiple times they both thought they would be fired from the show, her background in improv and sketch comedy, how she improvised Sprinkles the Cat, what she did to bring the stuffy, aloof Angela character to life, and so much more.
Improv was Angela’s whole life before The Office, she tells Brian; she worked at Improv Olympic Theatre and performed several times a week in multiple improv and sketch shows (alongside eventual Office co-stars Kate Flannery and Oscar Nunez). She’s related to showrunner Greg Daniels through marriage, and he was “always so supportive of my career,” attending her improv shows regularly. When she went to audition, he told her he was going to act like he had never met her before so she could audition on her own merit. She read for Pam Beesly, and though she felt good about her audition (and Greg gave her a secret encouraging smile on her way out the door), she didn’t get the part. Months later, they called her back and said they thought she was “a little too feisty” to play Pam, but “there's a woman who works in accounting and she’s sort of stuffy, she doesn’t have anything nice to say about anybody.” The rest is television history.
When she got the call that the show had been picked up, she was excited, but too nervous to quit her job at the improv theatre until she found out that their first Christmas episode had become the number one download on iTunes. “I was like, ‘Oh that’s it! Mama’s getting rid of her Chevy Blazer!’ And then I got a Honda,” she laughs. She and Brian weren’t series regulars until season two; she describes them as “easily replaceable” and remembers telling her mother that she could be let go at any time. “And she said, ‘Well, every office needs the b**ch!’” Plus, the amazing weekend she and Brian spent tooling around Scranton in a Hummer limo (“Best weekend of my life – and that includes becoming a mother!”), how she tackled Steve Carrell at the Golden Globes, and so much more; hear the whole interview on this episode of The Office Deep Dive.
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