Ellie Kemper has described her time on\u00a0The Office\u00a0<\/i>as “the gift of a lifetime”, and given the friendships she has formed with her castmates, it is easy to see why.<\/p>\n
The 46-year-old actress, who joined the beloved NBC mockumentary in 2009 as the cheerful and naive receptionist Erin Hannon, spoke to\u00a0PEOPLE\u00a0<\/i>recently.<\/p>\n
“Isn’t it the gift of a lifetime? I feel like I won the lottery getting cast on the show because it is so organic, and it is a very natural friendship that we share, which feels rare,” Kemper said.<\/p>\n
She was already a fan of the show before landing her role in season five, which makes the whole thing feel even more magical.<\/p>\n
Asked what she thinks has given the series such lasting appeal, Kemper pointed to something that feels obvious in hindsight but is actually quite hard to pull off, genuine relatability.<\/p>\n
“I think what speaks to audiences, or at least I’ll speak for myself, was that you can relate to everybody in that show,” she said.<\/p>\n
“There’s a character for everyone in your life. Like you can say, ‘Oh that’s Uncle Kenny, or whatever.’ You see people in your life in that show and I think that makes it easy for audiences to relate.”<\/p>\n
The authenticity, she said, extended well beyond what viewers saw on screen during the show’s nine-season run from 2005 to 2013.<\/p>\n
The cast are, in her words, “really nice people, so it’s like a nice combination.”<\/p>\n
That warmth has clearly endured.<\/p>\n
The cast remains in regular contact through a group text thread and email chain, with Kemper describing it as “largely pretty funny” and a reliable mood booster whenever a message comes through.<\/p>\n
One colleague in particular stands out as the thread’s resident comedian. “I’d say Rainn Wilson sends some pretty funny messages on that thread,” she admitted.<\/p>\n
For a show that ended over a decade ago, the cast’s connection remains remarkably alive, which, when you think about it, is probably exactly what Dunder Mifflin would have wanted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ellie Kemper has described her time on\u00a0The Office\u00a0as “the gift of a lifetime”, and given the friendships she has formed with her castmates, it is easy to see why. The 46-year-old actress, who joined the beloved NBC mockumentary in 2009 as the cheerful and naive receptionist Erin Hannon, spoke to\u00a0PEOPLE\u00a0recently. “Isn’t it the gift of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-latest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3804,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802\/revisions\/3804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesofpakistan.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}