Greg Pitts: The man behind the "O Face"
By ANN FINSTAD
Greg Pitts is incredibly gracious when we speak, especially considering that I have already woken him up once that day at the pleasant hour of 5:30 a.m., due to some pesky confusion over a thing called "time zones." (Which some people, apparently, are still learning to master.) Despite having all of five minutes of screen time in Office Space, playing a character that most people can’t even name (It’s Drew), Greg is easily recognizable. Why? He’s the "O-Face" guy.
See, now you’re nodding your head in recognition.
Greg Pitts grew up in Florida and although he was always a "performer" (he was voted class clown in high school), he didn’t get into acting until his senior year of high school. In fact, when he first began college, he appeared to be on the route to an Office Space existence himself.
"I went into college and decided that I would maybe major in business and maybe take some acting classes. I was sitting in an accounting class and the guy was talking at the front…" (As he says this, I picture a Lumbergh-esque professor, chalk in hand). It was at that point he said to himself, "there is no way in hell I want to do anything associated with this." He switched majors not long thereafter, and it all took off from there.
After doing some dubious "acting" in Florida after college (he laughs when he recounts his time there, which included working as a stuntman/emcee at a traveling wildlife show), he moved out to L.A. and took classes at Groundlings before launching the successful show "Smooth Down There" with friends, which resulted in agents, managers, the real deal. Office Space was the first movie that he did, and remains the one for which he gets the most attention.
He's affable about his notoriety for such a small role. Despite having numerous roles since then in TV series and commercials, he confesses that Office Space is "only thing I’ve done that anybody really cared enough about to come up and say anything" to him on the street in day to day life.
And say things they do.
"People aren’t shy to come up and ask me to do [the O-Face] at the bar," Greg shares. His "craziest experience" came while vacationing in New Orleans. In a bar composed entirely of drunk college students, it began with one person asking, "hey, were you in that movie, Office Space?" Before he knew it, everyone in the bar began approaching him and asking him to deliver the line, to take pictures. He admits to being shy at first, but went along, even when one guy brought his girlfriend up to Greg and asked him to kiss her for a picture. Of course, he went along.
"It’s nuts, people have some interesting takes on it. They seem to really love it and that’s fine with me."
There are worse ways to be notorious. After all, he says, he's not Tom Cruise, and people aren't driving by his house screaming through megaphones "Come outside Oh-Face, come outside! We wanna see it! Do it!" (Although something about Greg's amiable demeanor, even after I woke him up, makes me think he'd probably oblige, at least once or twice.)
As for the infamous line itself, which is probably only second to Lumbergh's ubiquitous "mmm, yeah" in my friends Office Space quote repetoire? It wasn't even in Mike Judge's script.
"The movie wasn’t originally written with that [line]." Instead, it was just the run of dialogue that came before, and a crude gesture at the end, a tongue waggle or something similar. When Mike Judge saw that Greg was backing off the gesture, he left it to Greg to figure out what fit. "[Mike Judge told me] if you don’t wanna do that thing, you can do something else." Not because Greg thought it was too much, but because there were other things he could do. So during a twenty minute break while the crew made lighting adjustments, Pitts retired to his trailer and spent the time making faces at himself in the mirror, cracking himself up in the process.
When he got back on set and they filmed the take, Greg says "I think I did five different things, and I can’t remember what the other things were. When we first did [the O-face take], I could see Ron Livingston’s face fighting back the urge to laugh."
Because Office Space was his first movie, he was nervous about trying his ideas out without testing them first, afraid the cast would start thinking, "who does this guy think he is, Robin Williams?" But he went ahead. After he watched the cast and crew laugh after Judge yelled cut, his first response was "oh, thank god."
Later that day, as a bunch of people from the crew watched the dailies, one of the girls literally fell out of her seat laughing.
Of course, it didn’t seep into the American public that quickly. When the film first came out, it fizzled in theatres.
Even Greg wasn’t blown over at first. "When it came out I went to the theatre, and I remember at the preview screening watching it and my first impression was like, what did we do? What is this thing?" He says this in the most affectionate way possible, of course.
"People needed to see it, absorb it. [On video] they can watch it over and over again and enjoy it. All of us were blown away, all of the fanfare surrounding the movie, having it fall flat, made us believe that was it, it was over." Then, with the video release, suddenly Office Space became the "it" movie, reaching the cubicle generation in their twenties and thirties who’d all been there, who’d had the boss that they didn’t like.
And, finally, a new quotable quote was born.
So what's next for the face that launched a thousand imitating frat guys? He’s got a small role in an upcoming movie based on the satiric newspaper The Onion, and it’s pilot season, which he say is always a good time of the year for him. He keeps tabs on his Office Space co-stars too, and makes sure to check out what they’ve been doing.
After all, it was Office Space that brought Greg to the masses, and even if you can’t remember his name, at least you can probably remember his "face."
