In 2010, Steve Carell announced that he would be stepping away from his role as Michael Scott on the hit NBC series The Office. Following Carell’s departure, several actors were brought in to try to fill the void, including James Spader and Will Ferrell, but the show ultimately only lasted two more seasons. There was one other big name who was considered for Carell’s spot at one point, though, and that was Sopranos star James Gandolfini. He apparently considered doing it at first, but the people at HBO had other ideas.
During an episode of the Talking Sopranos podcast from 2021, host Steve Schirippa told Ricky Gervais, creator of the original UK version of The Office, that Gandolfini was offered $4 million to replace Carell for the show’s eighth season. However, HBO successfully prevented that from happening by paying Gandolfini $3 million to turn it down. “They paid him that to keep the legacy of The Sopranos pure?” Gervais asked. “I guess that, and also, he had a deal with them. He was doing The Night Of,” explained Schirippa (John Turturro eventually played the role meant for Gandolfini in The Night Of, an HBO miniseries released in 2016).
B.J. Novak, who played Ryan Howard on The Office and served as a writer and producer for the show, later revealed that he was at the meeting with Gandolfini where they tried to convince him to join the cast. “I just thought it would be great because, to me, The Sopranos was actually the biggest influence on The Office, because of the way that comedy and drama and character were all completely indistinguishable,” Novak said on Watch What Happens Live in 2021. “In fact, the way Michael Scott will say something very serious, but mispronounce a word, I feel is a direct descendant of the Tony Soprano, uh, sense of humor.”
Gandolfini was a big comedy fan and, according to Novak, his favorite film was The Rocker with Rainn Wilson, so things were looking up at first. Novak went on to say that he felt like Gandolfini wanted to do it, but not in the way the showrunners were envisioning. “We suggested sort of a white-collar character for him to sort of play against type, and he said something I’ll never forget, which is, he said, ‘I feel as an actor, whoever comes out at 3 a.m., that’s who you should be playing. And at 3 a.m., what comes out of me is a blue-collar guy.’”
Gandolfini died just one month after the final episode of The Office aired in 2013, without ever appearing on the show he turned down The Office to do.
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