B.J. Novak

THE HIPPEST NERD TO OCCUPY A CUBICLE SPILLS THE BEANS ON HIS

OFFICE CO-STARS, TALKS ABOUT HIS ADVENTURES IN INGLOURIOUS

BASTERDS AND RECALLS PLAYING SCATTERGORIES WITH MICHAEL JACKSON

PLAYBOY: Have you ever had an office job? NOVAK: No.

PLAYBOY: Doesn't that pretty much disqualify you to write, produce and act on The Office?

NOVAK: I have friends. They work in offices. They tell me what goes on. A week ago a friend told me, "I can't stand this job. What should I do?" I said, "Write down every miserable little thing that happens and show it to me." Last night we met again. She told me about this rich girl she works with who steals cans out of the recycling bin so she can get the reimbursement. I thought, That's what I'm talking about.

PLAYBOY: As a writer and producer, how do you resist the temp­tation to give Ryan, the charac and hottest office hookups?

NOVAK: Fora while nobody wanted to write for Ryan. If I did it would look as though I was whoring for attention. The oth writers avoided it becausethey assumed I knew Ryan better than they ever could. But somehowthat all helped shapethe character. Ryan is someone who's lost. He's trying on different identities. Some of them are hateful and obnoxious, but lately I'm liking him,whichlwasn'tforawhile. Forthe past few seasons he had

just enough screen time to be a bad guy yet not enough for us to know why. But ever since he went back to being a temp last season, he's made more sense to me. He's kind of pathetic and definitely flawed, and I appreciate that about him.

PLAYBOY: Did you ever think The Office would go 100-plus episodes when you were the first actor hired on the show? NOVAK: Honestly, at every stage I thought it would be a big hit. No one really believed that back then, but I never doubted it. It's like The Simpsons. You can watch that show on mute at the gym and still laugh, because you get a sense of four clearly drawn characters. Same with The Office. There's the boss, the guy, the girl, the weirdo. Totally clear. It's icing on the cake to turn on the sound and hear how smart and verbal and subtle those characters are. But if a show (continued on page 102)

BJ. NOVAK

(continued from page T4) passes the mute test at the gym—which The Office pilot absolutely did—it's going to be a hit.

Q

playboy: Are the actors on The Office as weird and eccentric as their characters? NOVAK: All actors are pretty weird. Think about it. When most people are kids they watch a cowboy movie and think, That's what I want to be. I want to be a cowboy. Yet there's another type of kid who says, "That's what I want to be; I want to be the guy pretending to be the guy who's the cow­boy. " You have to have some odd extra kink in your brain to want to become an actor.

Q

PLAYBOY: So you were a strange kid? NOVAK: Mischievous, definitely. I loved pull­ing off elaborate pranks. I was shy, but pranks gave me a thrill like nothing else. I did one at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I grew up. I got a bunch of friends to steal the audio cassettes from one of those self-guided tours and replace them with cassettes we had narrated. It was for a Chinese art exhibit, so we put on ancient-sounding Chinese music. Some kid we knew with a deep voice and a Romanian accent did the voice-over. For the first three minutes the script was exactly the same as the regular tour, but then he started telling people to remove the glass on certain exhibits and get high on the paint fumes, things like that. By the end he was swearing at everyone pretty abu­sively. We had worked on it for weeks, and it went off perfectly. The next day I woke up and The Boston Globe had done a story on it. My par­ents figured out it was me, and I thought I'd be in huge trouble. But my dad was kind of proud of it. I remember catching him faxing a copy of the article to a friend in New York.

Q

playboy Your father, William Novak, was a suc­cessful ghostwriter for celebrities such as Nancy Reagan, Lee Iacocca and others. Did you hang out with famous people growing up? NOVAK: Sydney Biddle Barrows, the May­flower Madam [whose best-selling memoirs about high-class prostitution Novak's father co-authored], was at the house when I lost my first tooth. She told me to gargle with salt water. Another time my dad took me to a party at Deepak Chopra's house. All of a sud­den this figure sweeps into the room in a red military outfit and black hat and sunglasses and sits down at the kids' table. I thought, How weird. Deepak hired a Michael Jackson impersonator. Then I realized, It is fucking Michael Jackson! I remember three things about it: He didn't touch his food at dinner, we played board games, and nobody believed me at school the next day when I said I'd played Scattergories with Michael Jackson.

Q

PLAYBOY: Is it true you stalked Bob Saget when you were a student at Harvard? NOVAK: I invited Bob to the Harvard Lampoon when I was an editor there. I cold-called his agent because I'd heard Bob was a filthy comic,

which most people didn't know at the time. I wrote a lost Full House episode for Bob to do. The idea was that Bob's character, Danny Tan­ner, learns what sex is. He had gone his whole life without knowing, and after Uncle Jesse and Joey explain it to him, Danny becomes obsessed with it. At first Danny doesn't believe sex is real. But then he goes out and gets some pornography and is like, "This is sex? Holy shit! This is awesome! I've got to get me some pussy!" And that becomes his mission for the rest of the episode.

Q

PLAYBOY: What was your stand-up routine like when you first came to Hollywood? NOVAK: A lot of one-liners: " 'Battered women' sounds delicious; doesn't make it right." That would always do well. Or "I spent four years at college; didn't learn a thing. But it was really my own fault. I had a double major in psychology and reverse psychology." I still love doing stand-up, especially because I get to say things I can't say on television. Like this thing I do now about pandas. "Pandas are cute, and they're endangered. But that's crazy because it means pandas don't think other pandas are cute, [thoughtful pause] If I were a panda I would be fucking the shit out of pandas just so I could cuddle afterward."

Q

playboy: Was comedy a path to sex for you? NOVAK: Absolutely not. I've always been shy and inept with women. Like, every time I got near a girl in junior high or high school, it felt like a fluke. I still feel that way.

Q

PLAYBOY: Really? Comedy and Hollywood

money don't add up to a stellar romantic life?

NOVAK: The circumstances of my life are

different now, but part of me still thinks

every chance I have to kiss a girl is my last

chance. When you are sort of quiet and self-

conscious and average-looking, you're not

used to getting into conversations at a bar.

So it gets complicated when you're on televi­

sion, because the conversations start coming

to you. People—women, beautiful women—

have something to say to you. They feel they

know you. But all that means is that meeting

people is much easier compared with how it

used to be. I'm just not very good at

Q

playboy: Closing the deal? NOVAK: Or if I close the deal, I'm not very good with the follow-up plan. It's not interesting to say this, but we work really long hours on The Office, and I'd usually rather just recover on a Friday night than go out. Relationships for me are like screenplays for a lot of television writers. You keep telling yourself you'll start one when you get a little time off, but then you start one only to have to abandon it. You feel stupid for even getting involved.

Q

playboy: Is there any truth to reports that you and Mindy Kaling [who plays Kelly on The Office} recently rekindled your romance under the guise of helping John Krasinski [who plays Jim] plan his real-life wedding and honeymoon?

NOVAK: It's an adorable story, but it's not true. I did kind of date Mindy early in the show, but now we are just really good friends. And why John would need my help planning his honeymoon is beyond me. I've known him a very long time, and I think he's capable of picking a vacation spot on his own.

Q14

PLAYBOY: What was John like when you were students together at Newton South High School outside Boston? NOVAK: He was the guy with the follow-up plan. He was popular and smart, and if he liked a girl he would just ask her out. I was at home, meanwhile, writing to my local TV affiliates, telling them they should air more sitcoms.

PLAYBOY: You're serious? NOVAK: Absolutely. I couldn't get enough of ALF and Crowing Pains and Full House. I still love television comedy. You hear a lot of writers out here talking about the death of the sitcom, but I don't see that happening any time soon. The medium may change. People download our show on iTunes or watch it on TiVo or Hulu. Soon it won't matter what medium we're on, as long as it's funny. As long as kids are sitting around in suburban basements with nothing to do, guys like me will be creating stories and being funny and being dramatic and, hopefully, surprising people creatively.

Q1A

PLAYBOY: You played one of the Basterds in Inglourious Basterds last year. Will you be doing more movies? NOVAK: I would love to. That experience was unlike anything I'd done before. I remember flying first class on Air France to Berlin for the cast dinner with Brad Pitt and Quentin Taran-tino and thinking I couldn't have scripted such a glamorous thing to happen in my entire life. I mean, I grew up watching Pulp Fiction over and over. The movie changed everything for me. It shook up how I saw the world. And Brad Pitt is just such a superstar.

playboy Were Brad and Quentin what you expected?

NOVAK: Yes. They were exactly as they should be. Brad was charismatic and kind and cool, and Quentin was superintense and wanted to stay up all night talking about, like, the dif­ferent guns used in a biopic of Dillinger from the 1940s. The guy is astonishing. I mean, I don't know anything about movies beyond, basically, "Remember when DiCaprio said, 'I'm the king of the world'?" But that's what you expect from Quentin Tarantino. And what I've learned about meeting famous people is that they're almost always exactly who you expect them to be. I was waiting for an elevator after the Critics' Choice Awards, and someone said to me, "Hey, great job on Inglourious Basterds." It was Tom Cruise. In a

really weird way, though, that felt normal. If you were scripting that moment, that's the dialogue you would give Tom Cruise to say at that moment waiting for that elevator.

Q

PLAYBOY: Is Steve Carell what Steve Carell should be like?

NOVAK: Definitely. He's the same person you see when you see him on The Tonight Show or whatever. He's kind, smart and just gener­ally nice, and then very funny in a deadpan kind of way when the cameras roll.

Q

PLAYBOY: But we want our stars to be exotic, glamorous, surprising. Tell us one thing about you that would shock us. NOVAK: I don't know. Until recently, I drove a Honda Accord. Everybody made fun of me, so I bought an Audi.

Q

PLAYBOY: You're on one of the most popular TV shows of your generation, and you're driving boring cars. Okay, that's pretty surprising. NOVAK: I guess. I should be dating aspir­ing playboy models and driving a Ferrari, right? I've let down my 12-year-old self a lot already. But then again, my 12-year-old self was the one writing letters to get more com­edy on TV, so maybe I'd be his hero.