The word “Parkour” is engrained in The Office fans’ brains as they picture Dwight, Andy and Michael jumping and rolling around. And we’re sure many fans have wished that they could have been a fly on the wall during the filming of the episode.
But not to worry, the ladies from the “Gossip” podcast – Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey – is here to give us all the behind-the-scenes details.
Imagine this scene without hearing “parkour” after each move
This scene is definitely one of the most iconic openings to a season and it wasn’t even choreographed. Jenna got hold of Paul Lieberstein, who wrote and directed the season six episode, and he was able to give a few details of how exactly the guys showcased their parkour skills.
“…the direction he gave Steve [Carell], Rainn [Wilson], and Ed [Helms] was just a basic route to move through so that the camera could capture everything,” Jenna explained.
And obviously, with no parkour training, the only direction the actors received was “You can’t do anything wrong, and your goal is to just mess up the room as much as possible.”
And after an underwhelming first take, they tried it again but this time Paul directed them to shout “parkour” after every move.
“[Paul] said that ended up being the thing that gave it this really kind of weird energy that was very funny,” Jenna said. “So yeah, I thought that was great, actually, because I thought a lot of the comedy came from that the dichotomy between their very confident parkour and their horrible skills.”
This iconic The Office scene even had stunt doubles
After basically trashing the workspace, the three parkour pro’s decide that they are ready for a bigger and more intense challenge. And once they found their starting point, it was the Nard Dog’s time to shine.
He planned an epic jump off of a truck onto some refrigerator boxes. After landing, he wanted to leap to a dumpster, do a 360-degree spin onto a stack of moving pallets, and finally, backflip into a trash can. Easy right?
Well sadly, Andy didn’t even make it through the first move since he fell right through the empty refrigerator box.
But luckily for the fans (and Ed Helms), it wasn’t actually him who did the jump. According to the podcast, he had a brave stunt double who parkoured for him.
“Our stunt coordinator was Wally Crowder and his son, Shawn Crowder was Ed’s stunt double. Erik Solky was Michael’s stunt double and Scott Leva was Dwight’s double. But until they were up on that refrigerator truck, it was all our guys, even that scene when they’re running across the cars in the parking lot, those were our real guys,” Jenna said.
“And in fact, I guess they dented some of the hoods of those cars. They had to be repaired. But it was Shawn Crowder who jumps off that truck into the cardboard box. The box was full of foam rubber. I guess they had enough supplies to do three takes. They only did two takes and they used the first one in editing.”