The Office has been off the air for more than a decade now, but we’re about to go back to that wild and utterly ridiculous world with Peacock's new spinoff The Paper soon landing on the 2025 TV premiere schedule. The new comedy series, which features the same documentary crew from the Dunder Mifflin following a Toledo, Ohio, newspaper, includes several callbacks and staples from one of NBC's best sitcoms, including the iconic Jim Halpert “stare.”
I recently sat down with the new stars of The Paper to talk about the upcoming series, and during our chat, I made sure to ask if they had any advice for pulling off that classic “stare.” Chelsea Frei, who takes on the role of Toledo Truth Teller journalist Mare Pritti, told me that while she was “scared of those stares,” she figured something out:
I think the main thing, and it took me, and I think everyone, a minute to find, is how much you actually want to look at the camera. I think at first, I was probably doing it too much. You learn the balance of when your character would be talking to the camera crew and when they wouldn't. That kind of progressed as the season went on, and also as I got more comfortable with my character and what she would want to share with the camera, and maybe what she'd want to keep to herself.
Frei, who grew up watching John Krasinski pull off some of the best-timed looks into the camera in TV history, didn’t want to take all the credit when I complimented her on her timing. Instead, she said it was a team effort:
I think it's about what the other person does. To me, it was always like, because I felt like it was a lot of the time I was doing a stare to the camera after something insane [pointing to co-star Sabrina Impacciatore] you did. I always found that the laugh comes from her. It's like a layup. It's like the laugh comes from you, but then I get it because it lands on my reaction. I always find that it needs to come from somebody doing something incredibly authentic to their character that makes you feel a certain way.
Luckily for Frei and everyone who’ll soon be able to watch with a Peacock subscription, Sabrina Impacciatore knew her assignment while portraying Toledo Truth Teller’s over-the-top and absolutely fabulous managing editor, Esmeralda Grand. The White Lotus Season 2 standout opened up in our chat about how both she and her character approached the documentary crew:
I thought maybe Esmeralda just wants to become a star, and she's going to use the camera to seduce a possible audience. That idea to me was a key to look at the camera sometimes, it was a key to decide how Esmeralda was supposed to have her hair done. . . . That was mostly my relationship with the camera. Then, sometimes if [Domhnall Gleeson’s Ned Sampson] was doing something that Esmeralda would consider unbearable, she would look at the camera, commenting like ‘Can you believe what he said?' or ‘What’s he doing?’
As you will see as The Paper goes on, Esmeralda has a knack for making life difficult for Domnhall Gleeson's Toledo Truth Teller editor-in-chief. I won’t give anything away, but it leads to some of the funniest and most absurd interactions the show has to offer.
The Paper debuts on Peacock on September 4, 2025, with all 10 episodes dropping at once.
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