By all accounts, the good people who starred on the mega hit NBC sitcom The Office had a great time working together. They all seen to still genuinely like each other and regularly come out to support one another or make appearances in each others social media feeds. It's extremely rare to hear about any troubles behind the scenes on the long-running show, but it turns out that Rainn Wilson made quite the mistake while filming one scene with Craig Robinson, and he still feels so bad about it that he took the time to apologize publicly for the incident.
Craig Robinson, who played warehouse foreman turned office worker Darryl Philbin on The Office, recently stopped by Rainn Wilson's Soul Pancake podcast on Instagram, Hey There, Human. After a warm welcome from Wilson for taking the time out to speak with him, he relayed a story about how bad he still feels for the "horrible thing" he accidentally did to Robinson when they filmed a scene for the Season 8 episode "Mrs. California."
Part of the episode features a storyline where Dwight opens a gym (appropriately known as The Dwight Schrute Gym for Muscles) in the building and agrees to train Darryl so that he can impress a new female warehouse employee. Apparently, though, during a conversation between the two characters at one point in the episode, Wilson decided to play around with a small weight on Darryl's desk, and it led to an accident that he still feels terrible about. Here's what he had to say:
When I see you immediately I feel terrible, because I did a horrible thing to you once on the set of The Office and it was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done in my entire life....For the rest of my life I'll apologize to you...I had some little scene where I had to run into him and be like, ‘Darryl, we gotta have a meeting.’ Let’s go down to the warehouse. Come on, let’s go,’ or something like that…And you had on your desk a little desk weight, a miniature barbell… I was like, this’ll be nice, I’ll just pick up this prop and I flipped it in the air and it went bonk! Right in [Craig’s] forehead. He was shocked, and angry, and hurt and an egg swelled up on your forehead.
Egad! Can you imagine just trying to spice a funny scene up a little with a bit of prop business and then conking your scene partner in the head with a weight? I'm sure most of us would still feel as terrible about it as Rainn Wilson clearly does to this day. Wilson was sure to let everyone know that Craig Robinson was incredibly gracious about the accident when it happened, especially since Robinson pointed out that the small weight wasn't actually as light as Wilson originally thought it to be.
While not by any means one of the largest weights that could sit on someone's desk, according to Craig Robinson it did weight more than the one pound that Rainn Wilson thought it did. I can certainly see where Robinson would be more aware of the heft of the object in question, since it was on his character's desk, but I can also imagine that Wilson didn't have any idea that tossing it around would go horribly wrong.
You can take a look at the full interview, which starts at the 13:29 mark (and does include some lovely, non-apology conversation), right here:
Luckily, not only was Craig Robinson eventually totally fine, but he continues to be cool about the accident and harbor no ill will toward Rainn Wilson, which is fantastic, because otherwise, we might not have gotten this wonderful interview.
For now, you can still stream The Office on Netflix until it heads over to Peacock next year. While you wait for word on whether or not we'll get some kind of reunion special or revival of the beloved workplace comedy, feel free to check out what's new on Netflix this year and see what's coming to the small screen this summer!
