Alan Sawyer
Almost and accidentally are the key words in that headline: Bryan Cranston almost accidentally killed the entire cast of The Office.
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Cranston is most known for his role in Breaking Bad but has been in Hollywood for the better part of four decades. It was during a 2012 episode of The Office, Episode 4 Season 9, called “Work Bus” that the near tragic tale takes place.
The basis of the episode was that Jim played a prank on Dwight, the usual bit, but this one had the rest of the office on a work bus for the day. To make sure the cast did not get too hot they added an AC unit to the bus.
“What they didn’t plan on, they didn’t think,” Cranston explained on The Tonight Show with Stephen Colbert, “that where the intake for the refrigeration system was, was exactly lined up to where the tailpipe of the bus was. So the exhaust of the bus was going right to the intake.”
Cranston was not the first person to tell the story as it was in the book The Office BFFs, which Jenna Fisher co-wrote with Angela Kinsey. The chapter was titled “Death Bus,” a title that Cranston rebuffed.
“So, it’s not fair that it’s called Death Bus because no one died. It was — I’ll admit, it was my aim,” he laughed to close the bit.
He did circle back to say that Fisher probably did, literally, save their lives that day.
“She said, ‘I smell exhaust. It’s coming inside the bus.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Jenna, I mean, come on. How is that possible? It’s not possible,'” the actor recounted.
“I got a chair, and I stood up on the thing, and I stuck my nose up in there, and sure enough, it was billowing down. It was carbon monoxide. I wasn’t quite sure, so I got a second wind, I got some more, I got nice and dizzy, and then realized, oh my God, we could have all been dead. It would have been one hell of an episode. It would have been the finale before they would have planned that though.”
