Krasinski Puts in Another Day at ‘The Office’
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) Watching even a few minutes of “The Office,” it’s apparent that the NBC show is not a typical TV comedy. Characters don’t speak in punchlines, for one thing, and its documentary style captures people who are pretty much exactly life-sized, rather than the outsized folks who populate much of the television landscape.
It can make for uncomfortable laughs, which is exactly what the show’s writers have in mind, says John Krasinski, who plays the sardonic nice guy Jim Halpert on the show. “What people don’t realize is every ‘Umm,’ every ‘but,’ every awkward pause is completely scripted,” he says.
Krasinski and his fellow cast members also go through a ritual before filming to “sink right into that office feel,” he says. “We do a lot of warming up of, you know, 45 minutes just sitting at your desk doing absolutely nothing while the camera kind of roams around and finds certain things they want to find.
“You really do kind of lull yourself into that boredom and that kind of monotony. So once you get going and into your scenes, you’re pretty prepped and ready to go for just living through the situation.”
So it’s just like a regular office job, then? “Yeah, exactly.”
Krasinski’s Jim gets a moment in the sun in Tuesday’s (Oct. 4) episode. When boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) and toady Dwight (Rainn Wilson) leave the Dunder-Mifflin office to close on Michael’s new condo, Jim and his unrequited office love Pam (Jenna Fischer) blow off work and lead their fellow employees in an “office Olympics.”
“He kind of becomes the ringleader of the office for that one day, and it’s a big moment for Jim, because I think it shows his potential to be a manager or a leader of the office — which is something I don’t think he wants to do at all,” Krasinski says. “But it’s something that comes naturally to him when the stresses of work aren’t there.”
Krasinski figures Jim maybe didn’t quite finish college and fell into his job selling paper supplies at the Scranton, Pa., branch of Dunder-Mifflin. He’s content with the money he makes, but though he could probably leave whenever he wants to, “the thing that keeps him there is Pam.”
“He really believes he’s found someone he really, really cares about. It’s not just a crush,” he says. “I think you realize over the course of the episodes that it isn’t something he enjoys, it’s something he finds that he needs. … [The job] is not about the excitement for him, it’s about, Do I have everything I need, and every time he runs though that checklist, he’s got it.”
Talking on the phone, Krasinski comes across not unlike his low-key character. He apologizes for background noise — “I’m on a city street here” — and says he finds it “sort of outrageous” that he earned a part in Christopher Guest’s latest movie, the Hollywood satire “For Your Consideration,” due next year.
But he also talks passionately about “The Office,” and the way that Carell’s Michael, though he’s an insufferable ham who makes his employees cringe, has also turned into a recognizably human character over the course of the show’s eight episodes thus far (NBC last week ordered seven more episodes, bringing the total for this season to 13).
“It’s fun to have a boss who’s that asinine, but you need to show the softer side of him, and not in some kind of dramatic, thematic way, but in a way that’s more accessible,” Krasinski says. “If he was such an ass, no one would hire him. …
“I think they really play a lot with the fact that Jim knows that. Even in the first season, Jim never really outwardly made fun of him. He could turn and just make fun of [Michael] to his face, but he never does. It’s always in a subtle way, maybe a little bit behind his back, but it’s kind of innocent, because [Jim] knows he’s just more of a boob than anything else. There’s a little bit of compassion in that, almost like you feel bad for him. That’s really what we’re building on.”
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