It was a plan that would have backfired on a show like The Office, but, weirdly, went smoothly while actually making The Office.
Kim Ferry, The Office’s hair department head, whose other work includes Pretty Little Liars, The Mindy Project, and Veronica Mars, maintains an Instagram account loaded with backstage images and inside jokes for insatiable Dunder Mifflin enthusiasts. In a career-spanning interview with Mashable, Ferry chatted about caring for the locks of Scranton’s most notable paper sellers, and dropped a bomb of a secret from the series’s third season
John Krasinski had just been cast in George Clooney’s football comedy Leatherheads, and the production required a rather substantial trim. Krasinski asked showrunner Greg Daniels if he could wear a wig while playing Jim for the season’s final six episodes, and the boss told him “no.”
Here’s where, one could surmise, being friendly and charming to all the members of the crew comes in handy. Even though Ferry “felt she was putting her job on the line” she helped Krasinski in his underhanded plot. A colleague fitted him for a wig (which he paid for) and they slipped it on surreptitiously before a day’s shooting.
Afterwards, Krasinski went to the boss to once again “ask” to wear the wig. Along the way he bumped into B.J. Novak who thought it was a silly idea, without realizing he was already artificially coiffed. The Powers That Be told him Krasinski that there’s no way people wouldn’t notice, at which point he made a grand reveal. Ferry, all the while, thought for sure she was going to lose her job.
“It was nerve-wracking, but it turned out OK,” she reflected. Who could say no to Jim??!
Ferry’s next project is the ABC series United We Fall with Will Sasso, Christina Vidal, and Jane Curtin. Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II was supposed to come out in early March but was postponed until fall due to the coronavirus pandemic. If you approach New York’s Queens—Midtown Tunnel from the east you can still see a giant billboard for it.
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