One of the things I remember from those early seasons of The Office was how real and, for lack of a better word, accessible its cast mates were. My college roommate was cast as an extra on the season 3 episode “Women’s Appreciation.” In between when it filmed and aired, she told me that I had to follow Jenna Fischer on MySpace because she was always doing these blog posts from her computer while they were actually filming scenes. I checked her page out and thought it was so charming how engaged she was with fans. I remember that she had this really great post about her time trying to “make it” as an actress before eventually landing the role of Pam.
Whenever I’ve written about Jenna, I’ve always thought back to just how nice she seems, and it all stems back to these posts. IIRC, she even said that she’d show her castmates people’s comments and reactions. It’s been almost 20 years since the days of MySpace and The Office, and I feel like we’re finally getting some payoff. During his exclusive interview with People for his Sexiest Man Alive cover story, John Kraskinski talked about the public reaction online for those early seasons of the show. As you can imagine, there was some good mixed with some very scary.
John Krasinski has gotten used to navigating his life in the public eye. But when it comes to social media and online comments, Krasinski, 45, opted out of reading them years ago. “I remember on The Office, the computers we had [at our desks] were live, and that was the early days of like Myspace and IMDb chat rooms and stuff,” he tells PEOPLE for this week’s cover story.
His costar Jenna Fischer “was super into it and she’d go, ‘Guys, last night’s episode, they loved it and blah blah, blah. And so we’d all jump on,” the actor recalls. “One of my first forays down that rabbit hole, I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did they say?’”
Some of the comments made the actor immediately stop reading. “It was like, ‘Oh dear Lord.’ And I’ve never gone back. I’ve never gone back,” he insists. “Truly, that scared the absolute hell out of me, those chat rooms in the early days. So I can’t imagine where it’s gone since.”
Krasinski says the first time he even knew he was famous was in New York City where he lives. “It must have been season two [of The Office] because iPods had come out and I had no idea what an iPod was,” he recalls. “I remember a guy came up to me on the street and he held up an iPod and he said, ‘Look, you’re on my iPod.’ And the screen was [tiny], and I couldn’t see who it was, but it looked a lot like me. And I thought, ‘I don’t know if that’s fame or if that person’s going to kill me, but either way, that person knows me and that’s a stranger.’ So that was that was a big, big moment.”
I totally get this. It’s fun to read the comments until it isn’t, lol. I think people gave Jenna a lot of grace because she was known for being very interactive with fans, which endeared her to a lot of them. But as The Office kept growing bigger outside of the tuned-in online fans, everyone was fair game. It’s kinda weird to remember those early days of online fandom (which started a good decade before The Office came out), but it’s equally trippy to put together in real time how it morphed into everyone thinking their opinion mattered. I’m glad John figured it out quickly and has prioritized his mental health since then.
Photos credit: Paul Drinkwater/Avalon, PNP/Wenn/Avalon, Jennifer Graylock-Graylock.com/Avalon