'The Office' Cast Reflect on Almost Getting Killed While Filming an Episode
“We were all being slowly poisoned.”
It looks like whatever shenanigans happened on The Office weren’t just on screen. Cast members Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesely) and Angela Kinsey (Angela Martin) gave fans a behind-the-scenes look into their time filming in their new book, The Office BFFs: Tales of the Office From Two Best Friends. In the memoir, the co-stars reflected back on what’s known as the “Work Bus” episode, which also became dubbed as the “Death Bus” episode considering it was so deadly to film.
In the episode, which takes place in Season 9, Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) tries to get his wife Pam a day off, so he convinces Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) that the office needs repairs. In typical Dwight manner, he creates a mobile office out of a bus rather than just sending the employees home.
In the episode, Dwight swerves the office bus, but in real life, a stunt driver had taken over. Things were going fine until the assistant director yelled, “Swerve!”
“The stunt driver swerved HARD,” Fischer wrote. “I mean he cranked that wheel like Cole Trickle in Days of Thunder. As a result, the entire cast and contents of the bus went flying into the side of the party bus! What no one had considered when they told this stunt driver to swerve as hard as he could without flipping the bus over was that none of our office furniture, props, or set decorations were securely tied down.”
Things worsened when the cast began to notice a weird smell. “We began debating whether the bus smelled funny,” Fischer wrote. “Then our camera operator spoke up. She didn’t feel well. She stumbled and set down her camera.”
The smell was caused by the exhaust pipe and portable air conditioner, which were right next to each other. “So that hose was sucking in exhaust and blowing it straight into the sunroof of the bus,” she wrote. “We were all being slowly poisoned. Or not so slowly, actually.”
Revisit the episode in the scene above. For more, read The Office BFFs: Tales of the Office From Two Best Friends.
