Ricky Gervais’s dance scene in The Office is a classic sitcom moment – but it left those around him “genuinely worried” about his health.
The David Brent actor, who co-created the series with Stephen Merchant, shared the revelation while celebrating the groundbreaking sitcom’s 25th anniversary.
Gervais reflected on the dance scene in a special he published on YouTube, calling it “probably the most famous single thing I’ve ever done” – but said “there was a small chance of heart failure” due to the energy exerted to pull it off.
“I remember after I filmed it, I was sat in a corner on a chair and they were fanning me,” he said.
“I think I was the blobbiest I’ve ever been. I think I was like 14 stone, no muscles to speak of, just a blob. So, I think people were genuinely worried the way I was breathing afterwards.”
He continued: “Tom Cruise jumps off buildings. Do I want to do a little dance? I’ll have a go. It would f***ing kill me now. I’m glad I recorded it to show I did it once.”
Gervais said that, while the scene was “totally improvised”, he “sort of knew the type of thing” he was going to do when filming took place.
“I quite like the fact that it looked nearly real,” he said. “Some of them looked a bit like dance moves, and I can’t believe how low I got when I did the crab. I couldn’t do that now.”
Gervais did three takes of the dance in all – one in which Brent’s colleagues laughed, one in which Brent himself laughed and another with those around him “looking bewildered” – and then they “cut it together in the edit” to make it look like one take.
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Earlier this week, Martin Freeman, who played Tim Canterbury on the show, took umbrage with Gervais and Merchant’s historic claims that the show was fully scripted.
The actor sat down with Mackenzie Crook, who played Gareth, for a BBC Two special titled Remember… The Office, where he said: “What slightly annoyed me at the time, but only slightly at the time, is that when the scripts were published, they weren’t the scripts – they were the transcriptions of what had been on telly, so that annoyed me a little bit because anyone who knows any of us knows that line came from you in that moment, that line came from me.”
He continued: “It was loose, and that’s to Ricky and Stephen’s credit because the scripts were absolutely brilliant. It wasn’t improvised, but it was what I would call loose.”
Freeman argued that he “can understand why there was a little bit of protection about that because otherwise people would have gone, ‘Hey, you just rock up and just make it all up,’ which is clearly not the case”.