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Steve Carell sensationally revealed that his friend Paul Rudd urged him not to audition for his best-remembered role of Michael Scott on The Office.
The show propelled Carell to TV stardom upon its premiere in 2005, the same year he became a big screen leading man in Judd Apatow‘s directorial debut The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which also featured Rudd.
By that point, Carell was an established supporting player in movies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and series like The Dana Carvey Show.
Then The Office – headlined by Carell – proved to be one of the most beloved American sitcoms ever and made him an icon of the genre.
However, when news first circulated in Hollywood that NBC was developing a US remake of Ricky Gervais‘ BBC workplace comedy, the project apparently carried the whiff of a doomed venture to be avoided at all costs.
‘And I remember Rudd pulled me aside and said: “Don’t do it man. Don’t audition. Don’t audition. It is like – there is no way,”‘ Carell shared with a laugh on the Golden Globe-winning podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler.
Steve Carell sensationally revealed that his friend Paul Rudd urged him not to audition for his best-remembered role of Michael Scott on The Office; pictured 2024
The show propelled Carell to TV stardom upon its premiere in 2005; he is pictured on the first season of The Office alongside Jenna Fischer
‘Yeah, everyone was like: “Don’t even touch this,”‘ recalled Poehler, who herself in 2005 was already one of the stars of Saturday Night Live.
Meanwhile Rudd in 2005 had yet to achieve the A-list movie star status he now enjoys, but was already known to Friends fans around the world as Mike Hannigan, the love interest and eventual husband of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe Buffay.
His worries about The Office appeared to have been founded when the pilot ‘was the lowest-testing pilot in the history, I think, of NBC,’ Carell shared.
Poehler confessed that she harbored her own misgivings about a US version of The Office when she first heard the project was percolating.
She had shared her feelings with TV writer Michael Schur, who was then a colleague of hers at Saturday Night Live and later became a writer and star of The Office.
‘And we were watching the British Office like everyone else and loving it, and I remember they were gonna make the American version,’ Poehler said.
‘And everyone was like: “This is a terrible idea. This is a terrible idea! No one can be as good as Ricky Gervais. No one can do that show.”‘
She told Carell: ‘And then we heard it was you. And we were like: “Oh…oh, whoever’s making this show wants it to be funny.”‘
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The Office – headlined by Carell – proved to be one of the most beloved American sitcoms ever and made him an icon of the genre
Carell became a big screen leading man in the 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, also starring (left) Rudd, Seth Rogen (center) and Miki Mia (right)
Carell, Rudd, David Koechner and Will Ferrell are all pictured together in 2013 for the Sydney premiere of their movie Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
Greg Daniels, who developed the US version of The Office, later teamed up with Michael Schur to create Poehler’s own smash hit sitcom Parks and Recreation.
Poehler recalled that she was regarded as a ‘poor man’s version’ of Carell at the start of Parks and Recreation, which like The Office was a workplace mockumentary that leaned heavily into cringe comedy.
‘Parks and Rec had the worst launch ever. Everyone was like: “This is not The Office. We don’t like this,”‘ said Poehler, adding that she was told she was ‘not Steve.’
Rudd and Carell have worked on a number of movies together, including the Anchorman pictures and the 2010 comedy Dinner for Schmucks.
