On this film when you were shooting out of town in Montreal or wherever, was there any hanging out after filming or did everybody just go to their separate corners?

Oh no. Amy Poehler is the sweetest. She's like our mother hen. She organized cast dinners every night. One night we all went to a casino and it was really sweet. Very funny story at the casino. We walked in and Amy's just very protective and such a care taker. It was very sweet. We walked in and all of a sudden....and Will Farrell is very tall and like everyone in the casino said "oh my God, Will Farrell is here" and they started to come up to him and Amy was like acting like his body guard. She was like excuse me, let him through, excuse me we're going to need a private area and then the casino manager came up and I think thought Amy was like Will's publicist or something and said "hi I'm the casino manger and you're looking for a separate area for Will Farrell....oh my God you're Amy Poehler! She so took charge of the situation. She made all our dinner reservations. She was a complete sweetheart. It was a fun time. It's always fun to be on location and it becomes a little bit like summer camp when you're away. We started the film in Montreal so we started with that summer camp bonding experience so that when we came back to LA we were all closer so that was nice.

How is it working with 2 directors?

It was kind of cool. I mean it was like a blessing and a curse in the way that like there were always one set of eyes on your performance. Usually a director has to take in both the camera technicality of making a movie and the performance element of making a movie. In this case there were 2 guys so they could just divide and conquer. They would confer and then Josh would go talk to the crew and Will would come talk to the actors. You just couldn't get away with anything. All these eyes were on your performance so in that way it kind of elevated you because every take was someone was watching your acting but on in another way you were like “Man, I just want to phone it in for once. Just one take, concentrate on the camera, don’t concentrate on me.” Yeah it was cool. It was nice. For a big movie like this I think it was helpful.

Was there a bit of improv that you contributed that you were especially proud of?

Oh, man. I didn't contribute any improv to this film.  No. I'm not even try to improv with people like Amy and Will and Will.  I'm just going to sit back and stay out of their way. That was my plan. I do feel like I improv'd one line but I can't even remember what it is because it so pales in comparison to anything that Will Farrell might have said.

What about the phone call?  Did everybody just throw in lines?

Oh, that phone call was great. There’s that part in the phone call where Will Arnett hands me a pad of paper and it's like something's written on it. Every time he hands me that pad of paper it was different. I actually think it was like in his own way to say fuck you to see if I could get through the take having to read what he had written on the paper. It was sometimes horribly obscene. Completely unusable. Completely X-rated. I knew but I had to read whatever was on that pad of paper. It was like aggressive.  Aggressively harsh because he knew that he had me in that spot. I wish I had all those unusable pieces of paper that I could just staple together and read one right after the other because they were all a variation on my breasts. Like wax my jugs was what ended up in the movie, but like they were all various things I had to go do to my boobs before the date.

You guys are getting ready to film the Office finale I think the 1 hour.....

Yeah, this week.

Can you say anything about the finale?  Is it a big cliffhanger?

It is ...you know we just filmed our 50th episode directed by Harold Ramis and that's a pretty....that's the episode before the finale and there's a lot that happens in that episode that leads into a big finale. There’s a huge Michael/Jan storyline that is just really awesome in the finale but there's a lot of Jim/Pam stuff as well. But I can say that one thing is that their arc for Pam this season is that she's trying to find her own voice and trying to get what she wants and that is going to continue. Pam really is gong to come out of her shell in the last few remaining episodes of the season and that was really exciting.

Did you watch the British version of it before you even started this?

Obsessively and not even know they were making an American version. When they called to tell me, I watched the British version and I actually stood up in my living room and said “why don't we make stuff like this in America. This is brilliant TV. This is why I became an actor. This is exactly what I want to do. I'm never, ever going to get to be able to do anything this awesome.” Then 2 weeks later they called me and said we'd like you to audition for the American version of a show called The Office. I almost peed my pants. I was terrified because I thought I didn’t want to be in the scholcky sitcom version of The Office and actually my first audition for the show in some ways they were auditioning for me because I would not have participated in that sitcom version of the show. And I immediately knew that Greg Daniels was right on because my audition was ...I just went in in character and they interviewed me for 10 minutes completely improv. I decided that Pam Beasley is not a good interview. She's not going to help a documentarian make a great documentary and that was my take on the character and when they liked that idea, I was like oh this is a fun show to work on. They liked my twist and I liked that they liked my twist.

Have you ever had a boring office job?

Oh, more than I can say. That was how I earned my money as a struggling actor. I worked in various investment firms, medical facilities. I transcribed press tours. I transcribed the Television Critics Association Press Tour.  That was my 1st job in LA. I sat in a hot little hotel room typing away listing to stuff, listening to actors be witty. It was awful.

How did you feel when you came to the press tour in The Office?

I so wanted to send a huge fruit basket to all the transcribers saying been there and know what you're going through. It's smelly in there, they put like 12 people in a room this size with computers and you just sit and type away all day. It was brutal. I …actually at that press tour, I sneaked into...I pretend to be sick one day when they had this Saturday Night Live party afterwards all these SNL folks. I feigned sickness starting in the morning and I even sneaked into the bathroom and put a little yellow makeup under my eyes to make them look sunken in. I started coughing. I had this whole plan so I could leave at 5:00 so I could leave early. Then I went to my car, I changed into other clothes, put on makeup, I walked over to one of the limo drivers who had driven one of the stars to the show I said “Dude, could you just like drop me off at the front door.” He dropped me off at the front door; I walked down the red carpet right into the SNL party and ran right into my boss. He fired me on the spot.

That’s an awesome story.

Yeah, and that night I met Molly Shannon and Fred Savage who couldn't have been nicer. I had a great time but then I was also unemployed.

Can you tell me about working with Harold Ramis?

Harold Ramis.  Oh man, this year we worked with JJ Abrams, Harold Ramis directed 3 episodes, and Joss Whedon. Great. So Great. Harold Ramis is hilarious. We just pick his brain constantly.  We ask him all about starting out in comedy and what was that like and all the people he's worked with and that guy is amazing. I can't believe that I just spend all last week hanging out with Harold Ramis. It's so weird.