“That was kind of this weird turning point where it was harder to cut to people laughing at him because we’re all going, ‘Oh God, this poor guy,’ because he got roped into getting this condo he’s gonna buy and stuff. It marked a turning point for the series: Let’s do another take and really run with that.’” And we’re all like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I remember running up to him like, ‘Steve, keep going with that. Because we had him up on the thing, and it’s just supposed to be this joke of he thinks he’s getting this big honor and he’s so proud and everybody’s laughing at him behind his back, but Steve made this great choice to get very teary-eyed during it. “We just kind of stumbled upon it when we were doing that end scene in ‘Office Olympics’ when they’re giving him the medal. Instead, Carell put an earnest spin on it: As originally scripted, Michael taking the podium and accepting his yogurt-lid medal was supposed to be played for laughs. So we don’t want to make Michael Scott cuddly and lovable, but we have to be able to at least not just go, ‘Oh he’s such a bore, he’s so mean.’”Ī big adjustment happened in “Office Olympics,” in which Michael wins Gold in a stupid office olympics that the staff has put together. There was all this discussion at the network and among ourselves of what’s the difference? Why aren’t we getting an audience for this but he’s so popular? And we all kind of realized well he’s lovable in 40-Year-Old Virgin. The big thing that happened was… in between that six-episode first season and Season 2, 40-Year-Old Virgin came out and went through the roof. That and the one I did after that, the Halloween episode, were where we started to discover the tone that we needed to hit with Steve Carell. ![]() Appearing on the latest installment of our exclusive remote interview series Collider Connected to talk about his career and the new HBO Max series Love Life, Feig detailed how he worked with The Office team on the show’s second season to hone in on what made Carell so endearing in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, specifically while directing the episode “Office Olympics”:
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