Ed Helms: "You know, there really aren’t any deletes. There's like one or two deleted scenes but they're not important or meaningful scenes. Almost everything is in the movie. I think the fun little Easter eggs on the DVD will be sort of the gag reel stuff. There's a lot of takes we just couldn't get through. We were laughing."
How are you at holding it together?
Ed Helms: "I'm pretty bad. I laugh a lot."
How do you make it through The Office?
Ed Helms: "Oh I'm the worst in The Office. It’s a problem. They've had to shut down the set for like 30 minutes because of me."
So once you start laughing, you can't stop yourself? If you find it funny once, you're going to find it funny for the next 15 minutes?
Ed Helms: "You know, it’s just one of those things like when you're not supposed to laugh, it makes it that much harder to stop laughing. And for some reason Zach and I get in this feedback mood of giggling, and on the set of Hangover we just couldn't get through stuff. It's really funny because Todd would get really mad..."
Seriously mad?
Ed Helms: "Yes, seriously mad. Like, 'Come on guys, we've got to get this. We've got to get through this.' And of course Todd getting mad only made it that much harder to stop laughing. It was a little crazy."
What makes you laugh the most? Is it the improv?
Ed Helms: "I mean it can be anything. Sometimes it’s just a little gesture or a moment. The improv stuff, that's always surprising so a lot of times that's really funny. One of the biggest breaks we had actually, one of the biggest, the hardest I laughed on the movie was the baby was just doing ridiculous things and making hilarious faces. But I'm sitting there and I'm supposed to be having this exchange with Zach and the baby is like staring at me with these huge eyes and acting, and just making the most cerebral faces, and I could not keep it together. So I'm sort of laughing and so Zach started laughing. And Todd was baffled because what we were saying wasn't that funny, you know what I mean? And it was like all the baby’s face. So Todd was like, 'What is going on? Get it together guys.'"
Back to The Office (one of my favorite shows), is Andy ever going to find love again?
Ed Helms: "People ask that a lot and I love it because it means people really care about Andy. I really hope he does. I don't have any indication that he will. I just don't know. The writers are just now breaking stories for next season. I'm optimistic."
How open are the writers to changes?
Ed Helms: "It's a very collaborative environment. We always do takes of how it’s scripted, but then we also mix it up a lot too. And it’s kind of a crapshoot, you never know which one... I mean a lot of time improvisation doesn’t go anywhere and it's not good at all but, so what was written is often times better."
Have they ever found anything through improv that has actually taken off and provided a new storyline?
Ed Helms: "The biggest thing that comes out of improv that gets built on is just character traits. You know, for me the singing was born out of improv. A lot of kind of like the way that Andy talks, you know, the writers pick up on those things - little moments that I inject and then they start to write it in later. It’s hard to say if a whole storyline is spun out of an improv. I feel like it has happened on The Office, I just can't think of it."
Was it tough being the new guy there for a while?
Ed Helms: "No, it was never tough. It’s just the warmest group of people you could ever hope to work with."
