It’s no secret that Steve Carell means the world to everyone who worked on The Office.
Over the years, Carell’s former castmates and crew members from the workplace comedy have sung his praises and shared how devastating it was to lose him at the end of Season 7. Carell even described saying goodbye to Michael Scott and the show as “emotional torture.”
In Carell’s big farewell episode, “Goodbye, Michael,” the Dunder Mifflin employees sang a memorable, moving parody of Rent‘s “Seasons of Love” to celebrate their time with Michael in Scranton. Turns out, Carell had no idea that emotional song was coming.
In their new book, The Office BFFs: Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey shared a number of delightful stories about Carell, and explained that though he knew “something was up” when filming his final episode, he wasn’t expecting the song. That’s likely why Michael’s reaction looks so incredibly authentic.
“As we did our final episodes with Steve, it was difficult to contain our sadness at losing our friend and our trusted number one. We cried a lot. The worst was the day we filmed his goodbye song,” Fischer wrote. “People often ask if Steve knew we were going to sing to him, because the emotion on his face is so genuine. We’d all been given the lyrics and practiced the song in secret. Steve told me that as he was being led into the conference room, he knew something was up. But he did not know we were going to sing, and the whole thing was very moving.”
“The first time we tried to film the scene, no one could get through it,” she explained. “You can hear Ed Helms’s voice breaking before the song even begins when he says, ‘We want to thank you for everything.'”
BRB, crying!
Be sure to read The Office BFFs for more on Carell’s farewell and other memorable moments from The Office. Thanks to Fischer and Kinsey, you can listen to the first chapter below.
You can stream episodes of The Office on Peacock and follow along with the Office Ladies podcast every week on Earwolf, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.