‘The Office’: How They Pulled Off 1 Hilarious Dwight and Andy Fight Stunt
There weren’t a lot of overly complicated stunts on The Office over its nine seasons but Jenna Fischer explained that the famous Andy and Dwight “duel” scene in the parking lot was “complicated.” Remember when Andy pinned Dwight with his Prius? It turns out Ed Helms really hit Rainn Wilson with the car.
Andy and Dwight duel over Angela on ‘The Office’
During the Aug. 18 episode of the Office Ladies podcast, Fischer and Angela Kinsey talked about The Office episode titled “The Duel.” Andy and Dwight agree to fight for the affection of Angela, taking their duel to the parking lot at 4 p.m. bringing “the weapon of your choice.” Dwight arrives and yells for Andy, while the rest of the employees watch from the window of the conference room.
Dwight notices there’s a note on the bushes and when he’s reading it, Andy inches toward him slowly in his Prius.
“He is going to pin Dwight up against the bushes, he’s going to crush him,” Fischer explained. “Dwight can’t move. Dwight can’t hit him with his bike chain anymore, so he starts slamming it on the hood of the car. They’re screaming at each other.”
Kinsey gave some behind-the-scenes scoop about this moment, sharing how Wilson explained in the DVD commentary that they improvised yelling insults at each other for 40 minutes while filming this scene.
The scene was ‘complicated,’ according to Jenna Fischer
Fischer went on to share that the podcast hosts received a lot of fan questions about how they did the scene. “Well I talked to Dean [Holland, director] and he said this was really complicated because we had to shoot this scene over two different days from three different locations,” she explained.
“First, we shot in the parking lot with Rainn and Ed, they performed the whole thing, we shot it,” Fischer continued. “And the rest of us were upstairs in Paul [Lieberstein]’s office and the camera could whip up to us in real-time. Then they moved the cameras up to Paul’s office to get really tight shots out of the window onto the action below and Rainn and Ed had to do it all over again just to get a few little shots through the window.”
On a different day, Fischer said they shot from the conference room, noting, “and this time we had to be careful to not shoot out the window because there was nothing there, it was just a backdrop.” The director would shout out the action that had played out between Ed and Rainn for the actors to react to.
Fischer said that Ed was driving the Prius and the plan was to have a stunt driver make contact with a stunt double of Dwight. “But then on the commentary, didn’t Rainn say they just kind of ended up doing it themselves?” Fischer asked her co-host.
Kinsey confirmed that they didn’t use the stunt doubles footage. “Ed actually drove into Rainn — very slowly — and that it totally worked and those takes of those guys actually doing it were their favorite so those were the ones they used,” she explained “And they did not use takes with the stunt people.”
Wilson shared that the stunt wasn’t uncomfortable for him at all. “It was so much fun to shoot,” the actor told the Office Ladies hosts. “I don’t remember a lot of specifics about it, but I remember the hedge had a lot of give in it so you could really pretend like you were pinned but it was just a big mass of vines. And it was actually very soft and comfortable.”
