Interview: ''Office'' star John Krasinski on his new movie roles
By Hanna Tucker
Entertainment Weekly

So, I hear you've been cast in a comedy called License to Wed, opposite Mandy Moore.

JOHN KRASINSKI

What?! Oh my God, thank you so much for letting me know! [Laughs] No, just kidding. I'm really excited about it.

Tell us a little about the movie.

I play Ben, who is about to get married to [Mandy's character], and before we get married — because her parents are sort of more the traditional Christian parents — they want us to meet the priest and basically take wedding classes. And we just go thinking it's no big deal and we meet with the priest — who is Robin Williams — and, wedding school? Not as easy as we thought.

What exactly does one learn in wedding school, anyway?

I actually grew up Catholic, so I know all about it — they try to get you to understand that marriage isn't just this little thing you can offer someone as a gift. It's a really important thing to learn how sometimes it's not that easy to spend all that time with someone. They basically just make you aware of all the sacrifices you have to make before you do it.

Excited to work with Robin Williams?

I'm extremely excited. I've been a fan of his forever. In fact, I will say that I am guilty of writing him a fan letter — and he responded. I think I was a freshman in high school. I just wrote him a letter out of the blue and totally got a Good Morning, Vietnam! headshot, signed. So that problem is taken care of and we can go right into being professionals. Because normally that autograph thing is really awkward, but it has to be done! You have to ask for his autograph.

You have a couple other projects coming up as well...

The Office this year was just fantastic, and then I went right in to working on Smiley Face [a comedy directed by Gregg Araki]. — a sort of odyssey movie that Anna Faris stars in... And then I worked on Dreamgirls with Bill Condon, and I'm gonna be finishing up a small part in Holiday, which is Nancy Meyers' new movie.

Any details you can spill about those movies?

In Dreamgirls I'm playing a director — Beyoncé's character has basically become such a big star in the music world that she's now branching out into acting, and I'm the young writer/director who's considering her for a part in my movie. In Holiday I'm playing Cameron Diaz's assistant — no, editor! The editing assistant. She's a producer and I basically edit together her projects.

What was it like working with Cameron Diaz?

Um, intimidating at first, because I just think she's fantastic. It's just been such a blast working on all these projects because of the expectation that you're joining a family that's already been formed. And on Holiday, they couldn't have been nicer and more warm.

And you're in the new Christopher Guest mockumentary, For Your Consideration...

I'm such a small part in it, it's not even funny — but I said in my audition with him that I would literally walk across the screen and sneeze in his movie. Anything he wanted, I'd do. Because I'm just such a fan of all his movies. There's no favorite, but I think the most influential for sure is Waiting for Guffman... It's so spot-on, the perfect satire of the theater world and the acting community. I just love it. And actually, on Smiley Face, I got to work with Michael Hitchcock [the actor who played Councilman Steve Stark in Guffman], and we talked about his Barbra Streisand speech. I'm still not sure how he came up with that. I mean, there's genius, and then there's that.

What's Guest's new movie about?

A small, independent movie that starts getting Oscar buzz and then finds itself in the running against huge pictures. There's a Siskel and Ebert team who review all the major films of the year, and they review this little indie movie... I'm in the big studio movie, playing a cop. It's called — actually, I probably shouldn't give any more away, I'm just so excited about it!

Sounds like you've found your niche in comedy.

No, not at all, really. I mean, Smiley Face is funny, but it's on the line — it's a comedy for sure — but there's a lot of really interesting film aspects to it. I'm really not feeling one way or the other with comedy or drama, I'm just sort of doing projects that I've been finding really fun to be a part of. And I'll actually be directing this movie that I wrote in October. It's called Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. And there are definitely funny parts to it, but it's very intense and dark.

Have you cast anyone in Brief Interviews?

We're going to be starting that process really soon. It's a really interesting project, and [laughs] I hope the best for it. I promise you guys a first look and an invite to the premiere. I'll keep my word, for sure.

'Office' manager takes on new task
Steve Carell, the wacky workplace leader on the NBC series, envisioned and wrote the season finale, airing Thursday.
By Lisa Rosen - Special to the LA Times
May 10, 2006

Keep a close eye on the credits when they roll for "The Office" this week and you might notice the comedy's star, Steve Carell, wrote the episode.

At this point, it's almost de rigueur for actors to try their hand at directing an installment or two of their series, but writing them is much less common. But Carell's not one to shy from stepping out of the mold. A scene-stealer in the films "Bruce Almighty" and "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," he plays the eternally embarrassing "Office" manager Michael Scott to perfection.

The quirky comedy, based on the lauded British BBC series of the same name, started out slowly last year on Tuesday nights as a midseason replacement. It took awhile for audiences to warm up to it, but the summer break helped; that's when Carell's star turn in "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" hit theaters. Overnight, the scene-stealer became a star. "I don't know if that's ever happened before," said Angela Bromstad, president of NBC Universal Television Studio. "You've had a TV star become a movie star. But have you ever had a movie star in a series? It's all too good."

The show was boosted further in the middle of its second season by a move to Thursday night, in a slot after the NBC hit "My Name Is Earl," a time and place that viewers are accustomed to watching comedy. (The viewership went from 8.1 million to 8.7 million after the move, and the adult rating from 3.9 to 4.5.) "It's not as gigantic a hit as 'Lost' or 'Desperate Housewives,' " said Bromstad, "but yet it's the No. 1 download week in and week out on iTunes." The kids are watching.

The show has tapped into something different, part of which may stem from the way executive producer Greg Daniels runs it. He hired all of his writers as performers also and most of them have appeared on the show. Three of them — B.J. Novak, Mindy Kaling and Paul Lieberstein — play recurring roles as Ryan the temp, Kelly the talky and Toby the hapless, respectively. The actors he hired have great improv skills and the writers' room door is always open to their jokes and story ideas. One of those suggestions — for the "Office" staff to host a casino night — was thrown in a few months back by Carell. When planning the final show of the season, Daniels thought a casino night would make a great setting and asked Carell to write it. On the flight to and from New York to film scenes for the show's Valentine's episode, they fleshed out the idea further.

But after Carell got back home, his busy schedule gave him pause. He had essentially one weekend to write the script, and his parents were coming to town for that weekend. So he went into Daniels' office to try to get out of it. "I said I don't know if I can give it my full attention, and I don't want to do a half-baked job of it," said Carell by phone from the set of "Evan Almighty" in Virginia. "But he is a very persuasive gentleman, and I walked out of the meeting not only still writing the episode, but filled with all sorts of hope and excitement about the episode."

Part of that excitement was the chance to write for the actors he had gotten to know over the last season and a half. "I knew I could get away with a lot as a writer," he said, because "even if what I wrote was terrible, it would end up looking good because they're all such good actors." His favorite scenes to write were between Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer), because the actors have such great chemistry. "They have a real knack at playing that sort of realistic dialogue between two people who care about each other," he said.

He worked on the script at night after his visiting parents went to bed and handed a draft in on Monday. "I wasn't there for the rewrite sessions, I was off shooting. But the great part of it is that I didn't feel precious about the script," Carell said. "I felt like I had written what was a pretty decent half hour, but I knew it could be better, and I knew that all of the writers would make it better. They're all so smart and good and funny that I didn't feel weird about letting it go and letting it evolve."

Daniels gives Carell plenty of credit though. "He came in with a great draft," said Daniels, who was not surprised. After all, Carell's résumé includes co-writing "Virgin" with Judd Apatow, the film's director. "And can I say, looking back on it, it was such a great move to have him write it," not just because of Carell's talent, "but also I feel like, as a staff, we were too close to it. It was good to have somebody write it who hadn't been sitting in the [writers'] room." While Daniels wouldn't give away any big plot points for the show, he did say that with everyone dressed up for casino night, an elegant evening in the company warehouse, anything could happen.

Carell hadn't yet watched the completed episode, but the few scenes he had seen were a thrill. "That's a very exciting thing to have written something — or have been a part of the writing of something — and just see it come to life, and have it actually be better than you could have ever imagined it would be."

So is there more writing in his future? "In a heartbeat," Carell said. Then, with a modesty that couldn't be further from Michael Scott, he added, "Honestly, I can hardly think ahead to tomorrow in terms of anything I do career-wise. I'm always surprised to be working, let alone being given a choice of what to do."

Phyllis went to Cleveland High School ... and now works at Dunder-Mifflin
By Gail Pennington - Post-Dispatch Television Critic
STLtoday - Entertainment - Columnists
May 10, 2006

Do you know Phyllis Smith?

Maybe you remember her from Cleveland High School, class of '67. These days, there's a better chance you know her as Phyllis on "The Office," the painfully funny comedy that, in its first full season, has turned into a real hit for NBC.

Adapted from the cult-favorite British series of the same name, "The Office" arrived in March 2005 for a limited run and performed well enough for NBC to pick it up for fall. Paired with "My Name Is Earl" and boosted by iTunes downloads, "The Office" took off and was rewarded with early renewal for next fall.

The highest-profile St. Louisan on the payroll of the fictional but all-too-realistic Dunder-Mifflin paper company is Jenna Fischer, a Nerinx Hall graduate who plays receptionist Pam Beasley. But Fischer is happy to share the spotlight; in fact, she was the first to suggest that fellow hometowner Smith had a good story to tell.

That turned out to be true - and how.

To look at Phyllis, an "Office" drone best-known for her deadpan double-takes, you might never suspect that Smith was a dancer with professional companies in St. Louis, a football Cardinals cheerleader, and a burlesque performer with Will B. Able and his Baggy Pants Revue at the Chase-Park Plaza in the 1970s. ("No stripping," Smith points out. "But I did wear feathers.")

She toured as a dancer, including a stint in a can-can review, until she injured her knee doing a jump split in the mid-1980s and had to quit. Staying in Los Angeles, she worked as a receptionist and took acting classes, but "I fell into a crack, that nebulous middle ground between old and young, pretty and ugly."

Answering a call for a mousy woman ("I didn't get it"), Smith got to know the casting director and became interested in the field. A year later, that same casting director hired her, and for more than a decade Smith worked in casting on shows such as "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," where she spent six years.

The day that series wrapped, Smith signed on with another casting director, Allison Jones, and here's where the story gets bizarre. Jones cast NBC's version of "The Office," and part of Smith's job was to tape the auditions and to read with various actors.

Ken Kwapis, a movie and TV director (and Belleville native), was directing the "Office" pilot, and he kept asking Smith to read more roles. Big and small. Male and female. She read as Pam, she read as Jim and she read as Dwight, the obsequious second-in-command, played by Rainn Wilson.

According to executive producer Greg Daniels, that last one did the trick. "He told me later, 'We decided after you read Dwight,'" Smith says.

Nobody ever officially asked Smith to be in the show, however.

"I didn't believe it until a fax came through listing one of the characters as 'Phyllis, who has a background in burlesque,'" she says.

Jones, her boss, read it and said, "Is this MY Phyllis?" Then she kindly agreed to let Smith - still a bit stunned at this point - return to her job if the show didn't pan out.

Since then, Smith has enjoyed every minute on the set of "The Office," which is shot documentary style with some improvisation.

"There's not one ego in the whole group," she says, citing star Steve Carell as "the nicest person you can imagine" and the rest of the cast as so pleasant "the crew actually wants to be around us. The only problem is keeping a straight face."

The best gift she got this year wasn't even the early renewal but the announcement just before Christmas that all of the show's supporting players, some of whom still felt like background at that point, were being made regulars.

Being a regular means not just a steady paycheck but also the summer hiatus off, with no scrambling for jobs. Smith is using it for a long visit with her parents in St. Louis. Loy and Glenda Smith, who still live in the Carondelet neighborhood where Phyllis grew up, "are enjoying this so much. The joy this has brought to them has been the best thing about it for me."

The success still sometimes feels like a fantasy, she says.

"If you'd told me two years ago that I'd be here being interviewed, I'd never have believed it," she says.

More and more often these days, though, she's recognized.

"Never in St. Louis, except once at a Steak 'n Shake," Smith says. "But in California, I'm recognized every day now."

Kids on skateboards shout and wave. Joggers tell her, "Hey! I have you on my iPod." And once, at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, "a very polite man asked me, 'By any chance, do you work at Dunder-Mifflin?'"

"I really do believe there's a divine plan," Smith says. "Every piece of the puzzle has fit together to put me where I am. This is really an example of God working in a mysterious way."

What we know about Phyllis (the Dunder-Mifflin employee on "The Office"):

She's played by St. Louisan Phyllis Smith.

She's good at her job (selling paper). In the annual Dunder-Mifflin performance review, she ranked second.

She can play basketball and owns a sports bra.

She knits. In the Christmas episode, her "secret Santa" gift was a hand-knitted oven mitt. She wound up with a set of shot glasses meant for someone else.

She has a boyfriend, Jim Vance, who's in refrigeration and who sent her flowers on Valentine's Day. "She's happy," Smith says. "Happier than most of those people."

Steve Carell as Evan Almighty
Universal Pictures

USATODAY.com - First look: Steve Carell lets his hair down for 'Almighty'
By Susan Wloszczyna
May 4, 2006

CROZET, Va. — In the 2003 comic fantasy Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey had the power while filling in for Morgan Freeman's God.

But in Evan Almighty, Steve Carell has the hair.

All that yanked chest fuzz when Carell got a wax job in The 40-Year-Old Virgin? It's replaced and then some when God (a returning Freeman) transforms the news anchor-turned-congressman into a modern-day Noah in the sequel to Carrey's hit, now shooting in central Virginia.

And if that weren't hair-raising enough, Carell gives voice to a furry creature, a hyper squirrel named Hammy, in the animated Over the Hedge, opening May 19.

"Olivier had his different noses. I have my hair," says the actor, musing over his hirsute pursuits while on a set with a partly built epic-size ark.

For the first half of Evan Almighty, the star of NBC's The Office (Thursdays, 9:30 ET/PT) cements his status as a rising movie lead as a preening politico who uproots his family to the D.C. area. Summoned by a prayer, God materializes before the self-absorbed Evan Baxter, insisting he build an ark before a great flood arrives. Though Evan initially resists, he is unable to contain his hair growth, a spurt of biblical if not pubescent proportions.

"There are all different lengths of hair and beards, and each has a code name," says Carell, shown sporting his final transformation as Noah in an exclusive first-look photo from the June 2007 release.

Other stages: Mountain Man, Marlboro Man, the Unibomber, Ten Commandments (which segues into the Metrosexual with ponytail and braided beard) and Longest Brown.

"I was really comforted by the fact that Tom (Shadyac, the director) didn't want to do any onscreen werewolf-y transformations," says David LeRoy Anderson, the two-time Oscar winner (The Nutty Professor, Men in Black) who oversees the special-effects makeup. "It doesn't work for this."

Each shift is revealed to Evan — while waking up or glancing at a mirror — at the same time as it's shown to the audience.

The wigs are handmade from human hair, with some yak for extra body. The beards are hand-applied with prosthetic adhesive. "It's not too horrible, just a couple hours in the morning," says the actor.

His favorite look? "Just my own," he says. "That's the easiest one to get into. But it even takes a while to make me look like me, which is sort of sad and scary at the same time."

Fox Searchlight Pictures - "Little Miss Sunshine"
Release: July 28, 2006

Directed by: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris Written by: Michael Arndt Producers: Marc Turtletaub, David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf, Albert Berger & Ron Yerxa Cast: Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano with Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE tells the story of the Hoovers, one of the most endearingly fractured families ever seen on motion picture screens. Together, the motley six-member family treks from Albuquerque to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California, to fulfill the deepest wish of 7-year-old Olive, an ordinary little girl with big dreams. Along the way the family must deal with crushed dreams, heartbreaks, and a broken-down VW bus, leading up to the surreal Little Miss Sunshine competition itself. On their travels through this bizarrely funny landscape, the Hoovers learn to trust and support each other along the path of life, no matter what the challenge.

calendarlive.com: SUMMER SNEAKS - 'Little Miss Sunshine'
Putting dysfunction to the road test
By Mary McNamara, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
May 7, 2006

Take Greg Kinnear as a relentlessly upbeat self-help guru wannabe, Steve Carell as a Proustian scholar gone suicidal over a hunky grad student, and mix them up with Alan Arkin as the heroin-snorting grandfather and Toni Collette as the barely-holding-it-together mom.

Stuff them into an ancient, malfunctioning VW minibus with a bespectacled 7-year-old who thinks she can win a beauty pageant and her mute-by-choice teenage brother and you have "Little Miss Sunshine."

Cherry-picked by Fox Searchlight from this year's Sundance Film Festival for a record $10.5 million, "Little Miss Sunshine" sends the dysfunctional family on a trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach in hopes of letting its youngest member participate in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Though the what-disaster-will-befall-them-next narrative may seem a tad familiar, it has enough dark, wince-inducing truth about family life to give it true indie cred and enough star power to give it box office legs.

Not that anyone's visibly jockeying for top billing — in this true ensemble effort, the performances lift the film out of the realm of the quirky family road picture into a true group portrait with every member allowed his or her moment to shine.

Jenna Fischer Talks About Working on "Blades of Glory" and "The Office"
From Rebecca Murray, Your Guide to Hollywood Movies
May 5, 2006

Fischer's Busy Balancing TV and Feature Films - And Enjoying Every Minute

Fans of the TV show "The Office" have come to love Jenna Fischer as Pam, the company’s receptionist who’s engaged to a guy from the warehouse but has feelings for one of the salesmen. When she’s not busy working on the series, Fischer has been filling her spare time taking on roles in feature films. Fischer played a supporting part in her husband writer/director James Gunn’s horror/comedy "Slither" and will next be seen on the big screen in the comedy movie, "Blades of Glory".

"Blades of Glory" marks the directorial debut of the commercial directing duo Will Speck and Josh Gordon and stars Will Ferrell and Jon Heder ("Napoleon Dynamite") as Olympic figure skaters forced to compete as a team after being banned from the singles competition.

As with "The Office," "Blades of Glory" pairs Fischer up with actors who love to improvise. Fischer enjoys working opposite actors who can mix things up a bit and who don’t stick to reciting the script. “I love improvisation because I like to be able to contribute creatively a little bit more than just memorizing my lines,” said Fischer. “But I actually like absorbing improv from other actors more than I like trying to come up with the clever thing myself so it’s a good match. Will is very, very smart and very good with improv, and I just try and react appropriately. That’s what I enjoy.”

Fischer has nothing but nice things to say about "The Office" star Steve Carell and Ferrell from "Blades of Glory." “Will Ferrell and Steve Carell are in some sort of secret contest to be the nicest, funniest man in Hollywood so going from working every day with Steve Carell to working with Will Ferrell is like a dream come true,” said Fischer. “Will Ferrell is so funny, and you know one of the things that surprised me is he’s so brilliant with improvisation but he also comes to work incredibly prepared. He knows all of his lines. He knows everything he wants to do and I think that’s the thing that gives him the freedom to play around and improvise. He’s really a professional and so nice.”

Balancing TV and movies is something Fischer finds enjoyable. “Television and movies are so different. TV has a real routine to it and movies are sort of like short-lived projects where it’s sort of like a blitz. You make the movie in this one amount of time and then you wait a long time for it to come out. But television, you’re making it and it’s airing, you’re making it and it’s airing. They both work with very different speeds and it’s interesting to do both.”

As for what we can expect from "The Office," Fischer isn’t sure what’s in store for Pam and is just as curious about what’s going to happen as are viewers of "The Office." “I love Pam. I love getting to be Pam and I’m so excited that I get to be her for another year at least. I don’t know what’s in her future. We finished out this season but there’s a lot of questions that have gone unanswered still. I’m going to be very curious to see what happens next year."

After having finished shooting part of the film in Montreal, the cast and crew of "Blades of Glory" moved back to Los Angeles to complete production. The DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures comedy will hit theaters in 2007.

IMDb - Evan Almighty (2007)

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The Office
NBC's discomforting comedy gets the mobile treatment from Indiagames.
By Levi Buchanan
IGN.com

April 25, 2006 - One of the funniest shows on television is coming to the smallest screen. NBC's The Office, which stars Daily Show-alum Steve Carrell, is coming to mobile courtesy of Indiagames in The Office Games.

Capturing the essence of the series is paramount to Indiagames, which says it aims to bring "petty behavior and zero productivity" to mobile. Players sit inside the Dunder Mifflin offices in Scranton, PA and play classic cubicle timewasters like Wasteketball (basketball with a wastepaper basket), paper football, and table-top golf.

"We are thrilled to bring the fun, smart humor and the resulting awkward silence of The Office to mobile phones," said Vishal Gondal, CEO of Indiagames.

"I'm convinced that this suite of addictive casual games will lead to diminished productivity in offices across North America," said Jeremy Laws, senior vice president of Universal Mobile Entertainment. "I can't think of a more fitting tribute to NBC's hit comedy series."

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Evan Almighty begins filming

Universal Pictures :: Universal Pictures, Shady Acres Entertainment, Spyglass Entertainment and Original Film Begin Principal Photography on 'Evan Almighty,' Starring Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman and Lauren Graham

LOS ANGELES, Calif., March 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Filming has begun on the hilarious comedy "Evan Almighty", starring Golden Globe Award winner Steve Carell ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin", NBC's "The Office"), Academy Award(R) winner Morgan Freeman ("Million Dollar Baby", "Bruce Almighty") and Lauren Graham ("Bad Santa", "Gilmore Girls").

Blockbuster comedy director Tom Shadyac ("The Nutty Professor", "Liar Liar"), who helmed the box-office hit "Bruce Almighty", returns behind the camera for this next episode of divine intervention written by Steve Oedekerk ("The Nutty Professor", "Bruce Almighty"), Josh Stolberg and Bobby Florsheim.

Carell reprises his role as Evan Baxter -- the polished, preening newscaster of "Bruce Almighty" -- who finds himself the next one anointed by God (Freeman) to accomplish a holy mission.

Newly elected to Congress, Evan leaves Buffalo behind and shepherds his family to suburban northern Virginia. Once there, his life gets turned upside-down when God appears and mysteriously commands him to build an ark. But his befuddled wife (Graham) and kids just can't decide whether Evan is having an extraordinary mid-life crisis or is truly onto something of Biblical proportions ...

"Evan Almighty" features a supporting cast that includes John Goodman ("Monsters, Inc."), Emmy-winning comedian Wanda Sykes ("Monster-in-Law"), John Michael Higgins ("Best in Show") and up-and-coming young actors Jonah Hill (upcoming "Accepted"), Jimmy Bennett, Graham Phillips and Johnny Simmons.

Evan Almighty is produced by Shadyac and Michael Bostick ("Bruce Almighty", "Liar Liar") for Shady Acres Entertainment, by Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum for Spyglass Entertainment and by Neal Moritz for Original Film. Ilona Herzberg, Dave Phillips and Matt Luber serve as executive producers. The film is a Shady Acres Entertainment, Spyglass Entertainment and Original Film production and will be released worldwide by Universal Pictures.

The film's behind-the-scenes team includes cinematographer Ian Baker ("It Runs in the Family") and "Bruce Almighty" alumni: costume designer Judy Ruskin Howell ("Guess Who"), production designer Linda DeScenna ("Yours, Mine and Ours") and editor Scott Hill ("Monster-in-Law").

Evan Almighty will be filmed in Los Angeles, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

NBC Universal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience. Formed in May 2004 through the combining of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, NBC Universal owns and operates a valuable portfolio of news and entertainment networks, a premier motion picture company, significant television production operations, a leading television stations group, and world-renowned theme parks. NBC Universal is 80% owned by General Electric and 20% owned by Vivendi Universal.

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Harrison woman has ties to 'The Office' - PittsburghLIVE.com
By Rex Rutkoski
Valley News Dispatch
March 20, 2006

When Regina Krasinski wants to catch up on what her grandson John Krasinski is doing these days, she just turns on the television.

He's one of the cast members of the quirky NBC situation comedy hit "The Office," which stars "Comedy Central" alumnus Steve Carell of "40 Year Old Virgin" movie fame.

When Krasinski, a Boston native, visited, he played football in his grandparents' Natrona Heights, Harrison, backyard. On the sitcom, he portrays Jim, the sales rep. Jim has a crush on Pam, the receptionist, played by Jenna Fischer.

The show is paired with lead-in "My Name Is Earl" Thursday nights. Both programs have been renewed for next year.

Krasinski is a son of Boston internist Dr. Ronald Krasinski, a graduate of St. Joseph High School, Harrison, and Catholic University.

"It's great to be able to watch him," says Regina, whose husband was the late Leo Krasinski. "Everybody in the family is watching. They call each other when something new is coming out on the show."

She hopes to see her grandson at a family reunion planned this summer on Cape Cod.

"This is the second year of the show, and he has been on it from the start," Krasinski says. "He's made a lot of commercials and been on other shows, including Jay Leno, but this is his first big break."

"Office" is based on the British series with the same title that starred Ricky Gervais as an inept boss who was followed by a documentary crew.

The NBC version debuted with the same approach.

The show can be an acquired taste, Regina Krasinski says.

"It's a little bit different. It takes some time. The ratings are good. A lot of the things that happen in it, happen in a normal office," she says.

She says her grandson has "a lot of personality."

"When you start him talking, he can talk your head off," she says, laughing. "He stands and talks with you with a lot of motions. You never see him sitting."

He always could make the family laugh, she adds.

Now John Krasinski is bringing that laughter to an estimated 8 million weekly viewers of "The Office."