AUSTIN—The printer scene in Office Space came with specific instructions for the actors to get into the proper mental state to punish that peripheral: “Just think of something we hate.”
Actor Ron Livingston, who played Peter Gibbons in that endlessly quotable cult classic, recalled that on-set moment in a panel Saturday afternoon at SXSW celebrating the flick’s 25th anniversary. He also recounted the response of his colleagues Dave Herman (Michael Bolton) and Ajay Naidu (Samir Nagheenanajar): "They said, 'no, we got this.'"
Livingston, Herman, Naidu, Stephen Root (Milton Waddams), and director Mike Judge reunited with moderator Stacey Wilson Hunt of The Hollywood Reporter to swap stories about the making of the movie and its cultural footprint since an unimpressive 1999 box-office debut. (Hunt apologized that Gary Cole, who played the dreadful boss Bill Lumbergh, couldn’t make the panel. Nor could Jennifer Aniston, who played Gibbons’ girlfriend Joanna, “because she's Jennifer Aniston.")
Judge explained that this painfully accurate depiction of IT drudgery began as an animated short featuring Milton loosely based on a co-worker at his first engineering job. "He was this weird guy not named Milton,” he said. “No one talked to him. He worked in logistics or something.”
But Judge did speak to him at one point: “He launched into this whole conversation about, if they move my desk one more time, I'm quitting.”
20th Century Fox head Peter Chernin saw a live-action movie coming out of that short and green-lit the project. Judge recalled thinking Matt Damon would play Gibbons, but Livingston got the part instead. On the panel, he credited his experience working temp jobs for helping him grasp the character’s mindset.
“I had a ton of them, and most of them were great,” Livingston said. “If you're a temp and you know you can leave at any time, it's mostly fun.”
Naidu, meanwhile, took inspiration for Samir’s character from friends of South Asian and Middle Eastern ancestry who worked in IT during the week and DJed on weekends—"I knew so many of these dudes!”—and then decided that Samir would not be Iranian as written in the script but Jordanian. “It's always important to know where this person learned their English,” Naidu said.
Judge then recounted how he kept ordering thicker glasses for Root’s character, leaving Root with no depth perception while wearing them. Judge also explained why he made Milton’s precious Swingline stapler red: "No one made a red stapler. I just wanted it to stand out.”
That film’s belated popularity led Swingline to start selling an actual red one and left Root being constantly asked to sign red staplers. Even on subsequent sets, “there would always be a box of staplers for me to sign," he said.
Herman said one of his contributions to Bolton’s character was coming up with the insult “no-talent ass clown” as a put-down for the singer Michael Bolton after studio lawyers vetoed the script’s “no-singing asshole.”
Herman said he’s yet to meet the real-world Bolton but voiced some anxiety over that prospect: “Honest to God, I'm scared if I did, he might kick my ass.”
The movie had an objectively mediocre box-office debut, grossing only $4.2 million in its first weekend. Hunt saw few hands raised in the capacity crowd (which left me watching the panel on SXSW’s YouTube stream after being unable to get in) after she asked attendees how many saw Office Space in a theater.
Judge, however, said he didn’t feel disappointed back then. “It's probably a tough movie to market, to be fair,” he said. “Also, it was R-rated.”
But then the movie won a commercial afterlife on home video and a pop-culture legacy that now includes at least one case of workplace theft via maliciously recoded software inspired by the plot. Said Judge: “To have it become successful, this delayed reaction, was really the sweetest victory.”
The panel wrapped up with the speakers guessing where some of the major characters might be now. Livingston’s guess about Gibbons: “I don't know, he might be in an ashram somewhere.” Naidu said Samir would be feeling his age but “still gets loose when he has to.” Root’s take on Milton’s fate: “Milton is wedged between the bathroom door and the toilet, rotting away.”
Herman offered a different forecast, saying/threatening that “We are going to be doing Office Space: The Musical: On Ice!” before treating the audience to a vaguely operatic rendition of the following two lines: “TPS, three little letters, yet are met with apprehension / Three little letters, that elude all comprehension.”
And Judge suggested that Lumbergh might be doing best of all: “All of those kind of middle-management people seem to do just fine.”