Why Steve Carell Said He Never Watched the Ricky Gervais Version of ‘The Office’

One of the most obvious things to do if you’re preparing to remake a famous TV show is to check out the original series. That way, you can get a better feel for things and try to understand what about the characters resonated with audiences the first time around. Interestingly, however, when Steve Carell signed up for the American remake of Ricky Gervais’s hit UK sitcom The Office, he decided to go a totally different route. As he told his former co-stars Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey on their Office Ladies podcast in 2023, he preferred not to watch Gervais’s version for the sake of originality. 

Carell said that he’d developed “a very specific take” for his Michael Scott character that was unlike what he knew about Gervais’s David Brent. “I chose not to watch the British version because I didn’t want that to influence whatever this version was going to be,” Carell said. He went on to say that Gervais “was clearly so great at it, he was such a distinctive character, I didn’t want to do an impression of him.”

Carell also revealed that he found Gervais’s character “so specific” that it made him think to himself, “No, I can’t because that’s what I’ll want to do. I won’t see it any other way.” Fischer, on the other hand, binged all of the original show’s episodes prior to auditioning. By the time she tried out for her part, she was essentially imitating Lucy Davis, who played receptionist Dawn Tinsley in Gervais’s version of The Office.

Gervais shouldn’t take things personally, though, because in addition to not watching the source material, Carell once told Stephen Colbert that he doesn’t even watch the U.S. version of The Office that he starred in for seven seasons. He’s not alone, either: Gervais, who executive produced the American show and received massive amounts of royalties from it, has gone on record himself as saying he hasn’t “seen much of it.” In 2013, he told GQ, “It doesn’t feel like it’s mine. Now and again I’d watch one on a plane.” As for how he feels about people saying that Carell’s take was better than his own, he had this to say to his Twitter followers back in 2012:

The post Why Steve Carell Said He Never Watched the Ricky Gervais Version of ‘The Office’ appeared first on VICE.