On this episode of The Office Deep Dive, Brian Baumgartner sits down with “America’s favorite weirdo” Creed Bratton to hear all about his amazing life touring as a professional musician, how he got the part of Creed Bratton on The Office, how Frank Sinatra once saved his life, and so much more. Just like Creed on the show, the real Creed does have a passport under the name William Charles Schneider, but that’s because it’s too much of a hassle to change his real name (and also because “I’ve been running from the law for years,” he jokes). He played in bands professionally by the time he was 17 years old, touring Europe and North Africa, before joining The Grass Roots, whose first single, “Live For Today,” hit the charts – making him, Brian points out, the biggest star on the set when The Office first started.
Creed loved the British Office, so when he found out that an American version was being made, he wanted in. He had met director Ken Kwapis on the set of The Bernie Mac Show, so “I did something I never do” and called Ken to ask for a job. Ken gave him a desk in the background for the first season, and Creed felt comfortable right away, but wanted a more active role. “I wanted to play with these people!” he remembers thinking. So he wrote himself a bunch of talking-head interview bits and ad libbed a few things, creating a five-minute reel that he handed to showrunner Greg Daniels. “Next thing I knew, I had a six-and-a-half page script thrown on my desk, and they said, ‘This is your chance,’” he recalls.
They talk about what made the show so special, why they think it resonated so much with young audiences, what it was like to work with Steve Carrell (“You know how hard it was not to laugh when he would come in as Prison Mike or something,” Creed laughs), and of course the series finale. Greg had asked everyone how they felt their character needed to leave the show, and Creed suggested that they stumble on him at Poor Richards, singing his song “All The Faces.” At the table read, he discovered they had written that scene exactly, even surprising him with his guitar so he could play it for everyone. “I almost cried,” he says. “It was very emotional.” Plus, all his acting inspirations for the character, his insane stories about partying with The Doors at the Playboy Mansion, and so much more; hear it all on this episode of The Office Deep Dive.
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