Martin Freeman has pushed back on Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s long-held claim about The Office. He said his memory of making the show does not match their version, and that the published scripts annoyed him because they were transcripts of what aired, not the original pages.
Freeman on The Office scripts
Freeman said the book of scripts included lines that made it into the final episode, including his own improvisations. Speaking on the 25th anniversary special, 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 added that the writing on The Office was “brilliant” and that the show was “loosely” made, not rigidly fixed in the way the creators later described it. For viewers, that matters because the difference is not academic: a transcript of the broadcast freezes the performance as history, while an original script would show where the actors were adding lines in the moment.
Mackenzie Crook’s page-first account
Mackenzie Crook gave Freeman the counterpoint on the Two special Remember... The Office, saying, “Another thing people always ask you is how much was improvised – very little of it was because it was all there on the page.” Freeman replied that when the series became a hit, Gervais and Merchant said none of it was improvised, even though he believed the finished show was “loose” and that the cast was “also in there.”
That split is the point of the story. Freeman is not arguing that the writing was weak; he is saying the public record of the scripts flattened a more fluid process and erased the small in-the-moment contributions that helped define Tim Canterbury and the rest of the cast. If the published book is a transcript rather than a draft, then anyone studying the series is looking at a document of performance, not the actual writing process.
Gervais and Merchant’s version
Freeman said his recollection differs from Gervais and Merchant’s account that The Office was entirely scripted. He said he understood why they pushed back once the show became “the monster that it did,” because it sounded improvised, but he still rejected the idea that the broadcast version proves nothing changed in the room.
The Independent said it contacted Gervais and Merchant for comment. That leaves the issue where the anniversary special placed it: not as a dispute over credit, but as a narrower question about how much of The Office was fixed on the page and how much was shaped in the moment. Freeman’s answer is blunt enough. The show was scripted, but not sealed shut.
