Ahead of the release of The Office Australia, Alex Casey chats to stars Felicity Ward and Edith Poor about bringing the beloved franchise down under.

Felicity Ward and Edith Poor admit they are both knackered when they join the video call for our interview about The Office Australia. Ward just arrived from the UK and is delirious with jetlag. Poor just had a baby five weeks ago, and says she is equal parts excited and exhausted. “It’s an amazing time in my life where everything is coming to fruition,” she laughs, explaining she feels like she’s been growing “one baby inside of my body and one baby outside of my body.” 

The latter baby, of course, is The Office Australia, the latest reboot of the hugely popular, hugely influential workplace sitcom originally created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant in 2001. Felicity Ward plays Hannah, the incompetent manager of the fourth biggest packaging manufacturer in Australia and a female counterpart to David Brent and Michael Scott. Her devoted right hand woman, the Gareth/Dwight, is the twitchy and endlessly strange Lizzie, played by Edith Poor.

It’s very much a trans-Tasman affair – Poor features alongside fellow New Zealanders Johnny Brugh, Josh Thomson and Lucy Schmidt, with Jackie van Beek developing the series and Jesse Griffin directing several episodes. Given that it’s both the first English-language iteration of the franchise in 13 years, and the first to feature women in the lead roles, there’s no doubt The Office Australia will be one of the most talked-about comedy releases of the year.

As Ward and Poor settled their weary bodies into their velour seats, we got stuck into how they not only brought The Office back from the dead, but brought it down under. 

First of all, I want to know about your own relationships with The Office franchise. What do you remember about first encountering this universe? 

Felicity Ward: All my friends were in drama school when The Office UK came out, and they all just turned into Ricky Gervais. It had such a huge cultural impact on me and my friends. Not for a second did I actively try to be like Ricky Gervais, but I think that my 20s were just so culturally infused with Gervais-like humour that there are probably different points where he comes through. Again, that has nothing to do with me trying to impersonate him, but just that 20 years ago, he had such a comedic impact on the cultural landscape for everyone.

Edith Poor: I’m a massive TV fan and I was obsessed with The Office UK. My friend had the DVD box set and I stole it from her and, to this day, she hasn’t forgiven me for losing one of the discs. And then The Office US became one of my comfort watches in my late teens and early 20s, so I’ve watched that whole series like five times. I really like character acting and big characters that absolutely go for it. To be able to play a woman version of those big characters like Dwight and Gareth that I adored for years and years is such an honour and is still bugging me out a lot.

With all those character archetypes already existing in other franchises, how much were you thinking about them while you were shooting? 

EP: Well, first of all I had to stop using The Office US as my comfort watch to fall asleep to. And then I tried to block Dwight out as much as possible. It helped that when I got the audition script through from Jackie van Beek, I immediately was like, “I know this woman.” I did an audition where I improvised in my front room with my partner for hours, and I wasn’t at all trying to mimic anyone. Lizzie just jumped off the page at me.

FW: I had exactly the same experience with Hannah. I just knew her straight away. I didn’t have to block anything out, it was just this fully-formed character. I read it and was like “oh, that’s just me without any of the likeability.” What I have that Hannah doesn’t have is a crippling self awareness. She is delusionally avoidant of any awareness. What a dream, how freeing. 

Have either of you had that really corporate office experience, and how did you draw from those experiences while shooting?

EP: Big time. I worked in corporate in Sydney as well, so right in the heart of it. I found it was a very unique culture and I found it very bro-ey. I actually found Hannah very true to character for a lot of male bosses that I’ve had to work with, so I found that very authentic. What I also found from working in an office, while also working part-time as an actor, is that you blink and suddenly you’re 26 and you realise your career is more the office thing than the other thing. 

That’s what I think The Office is really all about. It’s about time passing, ambition fading a bit, and maybe even finding that you’re in the same spot where you started. But then you still manage to carve out these beautiful and human moments among all of that. I think that’s what makes it so joyous, that love still springs from that and weirdos still spring from that, even if you are just plodding along and trying to find nuggets of joy within the mundane. 

FW: Yeah, I think that that’s what the franchise does best, it captures the beauty of mundanity. It’s like when there’s a bushfire – sorry, very Australian reference – but it’s all black after a bushfire, and then you just see the first green shoots coming through. That’s kind of what The Office is, it’s this bushfire of mundanity, and you get green shoots of joy where you can find it. But I never worked in an office. I worked in hospitality, where every day was a bushfire.

You mentioned the broey-ness of corporate culture Edith, which aligns with the broey-ness of The Office franchise in general. Obviously this iteration is a huge departure from that – how much did the weight of that representation loom over you?

FW: I think the great strength of this show is that it is just incidental that Hannah is a woman. This is not a show about female empowerment. If anything, she’s bad for feminism. I used to say this about Liz Truss, who was the prime minister for 43 days in the UK, that feminism has finally reached a point where we are allowed to be mediocre as well. Except Hannah is not just mediocre, she is totally incompetent and delusionally optimistic. And so I think it operates well beyond just being a power move for the show to have women. 

EP: For me as well, the gender thing didn’t really play into it – except the fact that I’m so delighted to see Lizzie being such a weirdo. You very rarely get to see a woman being a jobsworth and a bit of a dickhead. It was great to play this pedantic weirdo who was authentically letting her freak flag fly. I don’t think I’ve seen a woman like that before. 

FW: That’s the great thing about Gareth and Dwight too. They are deeply weird characters, but Lizzie has this extra wonderful, weird androgyny to her. Why is she dressed like David Byrne? Why does she look like she’s from Talking Heads? 

EP: It is how I would prefer to dress every day, to be honest.

Was there much improvising on set or did you stick closely to the script? 

EP: We did a bit of improv. We ran these meeting room scenes and Jackie [van Beek] would say “just go for it” and all this beautiful stuff would come out. When we first got to the set, we had this amazing play day where they ran the cameras and we just improvised for hours, and that was really joyous. We then brought smidges of that play into the actual shooting – we’d do the takes as close to script as possible, and then we’d be able to add things in. I’m not as genius as Flick [Felicity Ward], so my responses would sometimes be just to smile and giggle. 

FW: In the script for the personal boundaries episodes, it said “Hannah uses the hula hoop to hula hoop”. And I said to Jackie “I can’t do it around my waist for very long, but I can do it around my neck for fucking ages. Can I do it around my neck?” She let me do the neck hula hoop which is physically a funny thing to do, but then she said, “oh, can you try to flick it off?” So I did and it hit the wall, hit Josh Thomson in the eye, and I also think it smashed a lamp too. 

EP: But doesn’t all great art break something at some point? 

FW: Right? If not a person, then a lamp. 

We also have to address the huge number of New Zealanders in this show. What do you think the New Zealand sensibility brings to The Office universe?

EP: The difference for me between Kiwis and Aussies is that Aussies are much more confident and are OK celebrating their success. They are a bit more front-footed and opinionated and outspoken. New Zealanders don’t want to rock the boat. There’s the tall poppy syndrome, and they prefer to back off from things and don’t like confrontation. Johnny, Josh and Lucy are all perfect in that they bring a real even keel to the dynamic. 

FW: They are much more muted. It’s almost like there’s lots of feelings underneath the mutedness, but you can’t hear or see it. It’s like with a trumpet, when you put a mute on the end, and it takes off all the top notes so you can only hear what wants to come through. I love that as a contrast of tones, because Hannah is so big and annoying and loud all the time. For her to be surrounded by the steady despair of New Zealanders is a really nice contrast. 

The Office Australia begins on Prime Video October 18.