20 facts you might not know about 'Office Space'

Mike Judge made his name in animation, namely with Beavis and Butt-Head. He also created a series of animated short films called “Milton,” which focused on the Milton character that would end up appearing in Office Space. For the shorts, Judge voiced Milton himself. These shorts would air on MTV, and later on Saturday Night Live.

Judge knew a thing or two about office life. He had worked in Silicon Valley for a few months as an engineer, an experienced he despised. On top of that, he had once worked a temp job where he had to alphabetize purchase orders. Additionally, the characters of Milton and Lawrence were inspired by people Judge had known in his life.

Peter Chernin, the head of 20th Century Fox, asked Judge to make a film centered on his Milton character. However, Judge was skeptical. His concern? “You don’t want to know what he does at home after work,” he told Entertainment Weekly for a 2019 oral history. Thus, he pitched doing an ensemble comedy set in an office instead, one with a more palatable main character.

When Judge wrote the script, he had one actor in mind. However, it wasn’t for the main role, or even the role of Milton. No, he wanted David Herman for the role of Michael Bolton. Judge managed to catch Herman at an odd time in his career. He had just managed to get out of his seven-year contract at MADtv by screaming all his lines at a table reading until he was fired. To be fair, that sounds like a very Office Space thing to do.

For the first read-through of the script, Herman was in place, and Stephen Root had been brought on board to play Milton. Judge liked both of them, which is not surprising given that they are both in Office Space. However, apparently Judge so thoroughly disliked the rest of the cast, and how the read-through had gone as a result, that he almost abandoned the project.

After the success of Good Will Hunting, the executives at Fox told Judge to go after Ben Affleck and Matt Damon for the film. Before Judge could meet with Damon, though, he saw a tape of Ron Livingston’s audition. He decided that he wanted Livingston for the lead role of Peter, and Damon didn’t get his meeting. Eventually, Affleck would costar in Judge’s film Extract.

The studio did still want one bankable star, and they got Jennifer Aniston. Not yet a movie star, her name was on the rise thanks to Friends, a show you’ve maybe heard of. However, the role of Joanna had been fairly small in the original script. All the stuff about “flair” at her job was added to give Aniston more to do.

McGinley, a successful character actor for many years, had auditioned to play Bill Lumbergh, Peter’s boss. The only problem? Once Gary Cole auditioned for that role, Judge was not going to consider anybody else. Within the Entertainment Weekly oral history, the director said that Cole made the character “10 times funnier” than he was written. Instead, McGinley got a role as one of the Bobs.

Much like his animated show King of the Hill, Office Space has a Texas flavor to it, as the movie was shot in Dallas and Austin. Although, Judge wanted a setting that was as generic and cookie-cutter as possible, to reflect his own work experience in Silicon Valley. That being said, shooting in Texas caused some issues. Temperatures got over 100 degrees, and fires in Mexico created a smoky atmosphere in Austin.

This was Judge’s first live-action project, and he had to deal with a lot of feedback from the studio, and it wasn’t encouraging. According to Judge, he kept hearing notes like "More energy!” and even “You’re failing!” They also wanted Livingston to smile more. Speaking of Livingston, he heard through the grapevine that the execs thought he was on drugs, and even wanted him fired during filming.

The soundtrack to Office Space is loaded with gangster rap, a musical style enjoyed by the main characters in the movie, especially Michael Bolton. That being said, this was something else the studio wanted to cut. Judge relayed to Entertainment Weekly in 2019 that he had said that if a focus group screening didn’t like it, he would relent. In that screening, there was one young man who highlighted the rap music as one of the things he liked about it, so that got the studio to allow Judge to keep it in the film.

Judge was happy to let the actors improvise on set. For example, Herman improvised calling Michael Bolton the singer a “no-talent a-- clown.” Not everything improvised was a line, either. Ajay Naidu, who plays Samir, was breakdancing with friends of his in his downtime from shooting, so he decided to do it in the movie as well.

The glasses Root wore to play Milton were so thick that he had to wear contact lenses simply to be able to see through them. That being said, this still left him with no depth perception. He had to practice reaching for his stapler to be able to do it properly, since he couldn’t really get a sense of where it was on Milton’s desk.

There was a scene shot for the film where Lumbergh’s Porsche is towed, much to his anger. However, the scene was ultimately cut. Even though it meant less screen time for him, Cole was happy about it. He believed that Lumbergh should remain at the same emotional level at all times, and this scene was his sole outburst in the movie.

The poster designed to promote Office Space did not feature any of the cast. It just featured a random guy covered in Post-it Notes and said, “Work sucks.” Judge absolutely hated it. He said that people found it confusing and that it looked like an ad for Office Depot, not a movie. To be fair, Judge also hated the TV ads and the trailers. "It was a very difficult movie to market," Judge told EW in 2019.

Office Space got solid reviews, including three stars from Roger Ebert. However, it did not do well in the box office. It debuted eighth in the box office charts and would only make $10.8 million domestically and $2 million internationally. This was off of a budget of $10 million, meaning it barely broke even. When you factor in marketing, it probably didn’t even do that.

Livingston and others have said that the rise of Office Space began with Comedy Central. The movie first aired on the network in 2001, drawing an audience of 1.4 million. Over the next two years, the network would air the film 35 more times. In 2003, after all those airings, the movie sold 2.6 million copies on VHS and DVD. As of 2006, it had raked in over $8 million in home media sales, turning the film into a cult classic and also a profitable movie for Fox.

Judge explained in the EW oral history in 2019 that he had realized that Office Space was gaining a foothold when he heard two Starbucks baristas doing impressions of Lumbergh. Indeed, Cole has said he gets impressions of his character done to him all the time. Aniston, in spite of all her success, gets references to her role in Office Space, too, especially if she is out eating at a restaurant. Then, there’s Livingston, who has said that many a fan have told him they quit their jobs because of him. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly placed the film fifth on its ranking of the best comedies of the last 25 years, which was notable given that its critic gave the movie a “C” back when it was released.

Judge went to eat at a TGI Fridays, the chain that inspired his film’s flair-loving restaurant Chotchkie’s. However, he noticed that the buttons on the uniforms at Fridays were gone. Judge asked the manager, and the manager told him that after Office Space came out, customers kept making jokes about the “flair,” so it was dropped from the dress code. Additionally, Swingline didn’t have an actual red stapler available when Office Space was released, but after years of requests from fans of the film, they added one to their catalog.

Judge has had his interest gauged in doing a sequel or a TV series based on Office Space, though he has always demurred. He does consider his movie Extract a bit of a companion piece, though. Evidently, Office Space did get Judge an opportunity. As he told Entertainment Weekly in 2019, NBC approached him about adapting the British show The Office for American audiences. However, the packet that NBC sent Judge included some reviews of The Office. One said that the show “succeeds where movies like Office Space failed.” After that, Judge declined the offer.