Hide your booze and your steak coupons, because Kate Flannery is on this episode of The Office Deep Dive, talking to Brian Baumgartner about all her favorite moments playing the messy Meredith Palmer on The Office. Whether it’s the sexual tension she had with Steve Carrell, or the sexual tension she had with Brian, or the sexual tension everyone had with James Spader, she’s not afraid to spill the beans. “I’ve always felt a special bond with Kate, because I think, more than anyone else in the cast, Kate and I put our bodies on the line for the show,” Brian says. “She was completely fearless and always up for anything.” She shares her casting process, how she felt about Steve leaving, the scant direction she was given for her character (“They said, ‘She’s lactose intolerant, divorced, and she had a hysterectomy. Go!’”), and so much more in this hilarious interview.
She actually read for the part of Jan, but “obviously they went in a completely different direction….There would be too much sexual chemistry between me and Steve if I got that part,” she jokes. She worked as a waitress throughout the first season, only quitting when they got picked up for a second. She remembers that Greg Daniels came in to eat once and, disregarding her work clothes, proceeded to talk to her about the show: “He said, ‘I need to talk to you – I’m fighting with the network about ‘vagina,’” she laughs. Another time, “Marty Panzer, who was Barry Manilow’s lyricist, was pissed, he was like, ‘I come here on Tuesday nights and nobody wants to wait on me, because they’re all at the bar watching you, and I can’t get any good service!’” She loves that; what she didn’t like was when people were “a little too sad for me” that she was waiting tables. “I was like, it’s fine! Steve’s the 40-year-old virgin and I’m the 40-year-old waitress!”
She felt like she didn’t really hit her stride with Meredith until after Michael Scott hit her with his car and broke her hip; after that “it was off to the races!” Brian loves how weirdly specific their characters would get; Kevin, for example, was a pretty broad stereotype in the beginning, but then he “was very good at basketball, and he’s a poker savant,” Brian says. Meredith’s the same: “She’s a mess but she’s not a victim, and she’s not as involved but in a very conscious way. She’s not excluded, she just doesn’t want to get involved.” And Kate loves that sometimes they would leave things unexplained, like when Meredith got sun poisoning and her skin kept getting worse and worse but no one ever commented on it. “Because how many times do you work with people that you’re not that close to and there’s something going on and you’re like, ‘Ugh, I don’t even want to know!’” she laughs. Hear more from Kate Flannery, including how she met her boyfriend on the set of The Office, the time she grabbed James Spader’s butt, how Carol Burnett almost played her mother, and much more on this episode of The Office Deep Dive.
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