Angela Kinsey on How ‘The Office’ Ruined Her Face
The Office‘s Angela Martin (Schrute by the end of the series) is known for her cold demeanor and generally bad attitude. She is the head of Accounting at Dunder Mifflin Scranton, and she has an unparalleled passion for cats.
Angela Kinsey, the actor who played the stern former head of the party planning committee, is nothing like her character. But one facet of the fictional Angela has stuck with Kinsey all these years later.
Angela Kinsey on Playing Angela Martin in ‘The Office’
When The Office was airing, and even after, Kinsey was surprised at how many people would come up to her and tell her how relatable her character is.
“I have more people than you can imagine come up to me and say, ‘Oh, my god—I sooo work with an Angela Martin, and she drives us all crazy. She’s the fun-stopper of the office,'” Kinsey told Vanity Fair in 2008. “And I’m like, ‘Cool.’ I love to hear it.”
Just because Angela Martin doesn’t have any fun (unless she’s singing Christmas songs on a karaoke machine), doesn’t mean that she’s not a fun character to play. Kinsey calls the role of Angela “a buffet” for an actor.
“I never know what our writers are going to come up with,” she said at the time. “And we have such a creative environment. Compared to other shows, the actors really have a dialogue with the writers. We’re sort of shaping the characters together—there’s a real give and take. But maybe a good sound bite for you on what I like about my character—that she’s crazy! And it’s fun to play crazy.”
On Angela Martin’s arc
One of the best parts about playing Angela, for Kinsey, was that she was multi-faceted.
“The thing that I really love about our show is that we don’t have the natural arcs of most sitcoms as far as characters go,” she said. “You know, on some shows, the b*tch has to always be the b*tch, and the bad guy’s always the bad guy, the good guy’s always the good guy. And on our show, in one episode you can hate Michael and think he’s an idiot, and then in the next be touched by something tender he does. I like that. You can see my character be a total b*tch but then see her fall in love and then see her heart get broken.”
The worst thing that’s stuck with Angela Kinsey since her days on ‘The Office’
In an interview with People in Feb. 2021, Kinsey said her “resting face” has forever changed since playing her Office character. She recalled the time she was in Las Vegas for a friend’s wedding, have a wonderful time.
“I hop in the elevator, I’m really happy, ecstatically happy,” she said. “And this elder gentleman gets in the elevator with me and he looks at me and goes, ‘Oh honey, it’s going to be OK.’ I said, ‘What?’ And I looked at my reflection in the mirror and I have that frickin’ Angela Martin scowl on my face. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this has become my resting face.’ Nine years of scowling and this is my go-to resting face. Even when I’m happy.”
Hey, it could be worse. At least Kinsey didn’t accidentally adopt her character’s practice of licking her cats.
