Rashida Jones Felt Like She'd 'Won a Radio Contest' Joining “The Office” After She 'Loved' the First Two Seasons

Being on set was "a full mind-blower" for the actress as she was a big fan of the show

Rashida Jones could hardly believe where she was on her first day on the set of The Office.

The actress, 48, joined the sitcom in season 3 as a love interest for John Krasinski's character Jim Halpert, and she recalled her first day of filming as being very surreal considering she was already a big fan of the show.

"I think my first scene was [with] everybody. It was one of those, like, conference room scenes with Steve [Carell] in front, just being absolutely absurd," she said on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show with Julia Cunningham. "And I felt like I had won like a radio contest or something, cause I had watched and loved that show for two seasons, and all of a sudden I'm like in the room with the people."

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Jones, particularly, praised Carell's humor as he led the cast as the paper company's inept but hilarious branch manager, Michael Scott.

"Steve is virtuosic. Like, the thing he did on The Office was like 10 percent of what he was doing on set," she said. "Every single take was like just the most outlandish, like brave, weird, interesting, hilarious thing you've ever seen every single time. So it was just like a full mind-blower."

Jones added that she'd "never seen anybody perform like that before" before working with Carell, 61, on the beloved sitcom.

Many of Carell's former costars have shared similar stories about how hard it was to stay in character on set given how hilarious his character was. Recently, Phyllis Smith shared that there was one scene in particular that she and Carell could hardly get through on season 3 of the show.

"The one scene I had a really hard time not laughing through was ... when [Carell] came into the bride's room to give me advice, and we could not get through the word 'pungent,'" Smith said on the Office Ladies podcast last month, describing a moment when Michael accuses Phyllis of farting.

"Every time he would say 'pungent,' he would break out in his cackle. He couldn't get through it and I couldn't get through it," she recalled. "And then we hear the sound people sitting outside the door laughing, so they had to move them down the stairway, down into the bottom because every time we said 'pungent,' we lost it."

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Following her one-season stint as Karen Filippelli on The Office, Jones went on to star as Ann Perkins in Parks and Recreation, which she, Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Chris Pratt, Aubrey Plaza and Adam Scott all led for seven seasons.

She is currently starring on Sunny, a new Apple TV+ series that premiered on July 10. The dark comedy follows Suzie (Jones), an American woman living in Japan, and Sunny (Joanna Sotomura), a domestic robot made by her late husband's company. Per a synopsis of the series, they work together to "uncover the dark truth of what really happened to Suzie’s family and become dangerously enmeshed in a world Suzie never knew existed."

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The Office can be streamed in full on Peacock, and new episodes of Sunny arrive Wednesdays on Apple TV+.

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