Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
This shouldn’t have been so complicated. We really thought we knew who Phyllis Smith was.
She’s just getting to the good part of a story about the time when her television co-star Steve Carell was having one of those dreams about her—it’s a scene she shot for The 40-Year-Old Virgin that ultimately got cut, but still—when she stops in midsentence to give a little wave to someone over our shoulder. Aside from feeling as if we’ve been unfairly left hanging, we think nothing of the interruption because A.) she scrunches up her shoulders, grins like a madwoman and mouths “Come over” as she waves, so it must be an old friend; B.) we’re sitting at a restaurant in St. Louis, her hometown, so the fact that she would run into an old friend is hardly something to think twice about; and C.) this is the first time she’s stopped talking in almost half an hour, so we consider it a welcome opportunity to steal a few bites of our lunch, which has until now gone untouched.
Except, as we realize once the old friend reaches the table, it’s not an old friend. It’s two giggly, twentysomething bobbleheads whom she has never met and who barely have enough willpower to keep themselves from doing anything more obnoxious than blurting out, “It’s Phyllis!”
As Phyllis Lapin-Vance, the mousy salesperson at the fictional Dunder-Mifflin paper company on NBC’s phenomenally successful sitcom The Office, she is, by almost any standard of superficial critique, just another face in the crowd. She is neither attractive nor unattractive, plain without being frumpy, warm but not especially memorable—the personification of muted tones—and in person she’s ... kind of the same. She smiles a little more, laughs a little more (actually, she snorts when you really get her going, which she follows with an embarrassed “OH!”), is maybe a little more outgoing, but honestly, if you’ve seen the show—and, frankly, if you haven’t seen the show, we’re going to assume you don’t own a TV—you’ve got a decent idea of what she’s like. Or so we thought—which leads us to this “duality of Phyllis” thing that she’s got going on.
Case in point: At present, she’s being besieged by this giddy tangle of breathless praise and fluttering hands and stammering questions—something we assumed would cause her to fold into herself—and she’s digging it. She genuinely seems every bit as excited as the bobbleheads are by the chance encounter, and she shoos away any apprehension they might have about interrupting her meal—it’s not like she was eating her Cobb salad anyway—with a giggle and the reassurance that it’s “absolutely fine!” (In fact, as she’ll later tell us, her admirers stood at the edge of the dining room, visibly fretting over whether it would be kosher to approach until she noticed and waved them over.) She even goes so far as to call the attention “pretty cool” but admits it’s pretty weird, too.
See, Phyllis Smith has gotten pretty used to being Phyllis Smith, just another member of the working weak who put her head down and disappeared into the world for a couple decades. So when she’s recognized as Phyllis Lapin-Vance, she still has to take a second to remind herself why a stranger would pick her out of a crowd, much less want to talk to her. “I walked around in my own anonymity for years. When I was younger, I may have turned a few heads because I was tall and thin. I wasn’t real attractive, just sort of in the nebulous middle. Then I got older and got heavy, and people stopped holding doors for me at the bank—it was like I wasn’t even there,” she says, and even though she says she’s comfortable with who she is, we sense a hint of lingering disappointment. “So now, when people approach me, I’m not even aware that they’ve seen me.”
This is not the false humility of the Maxim covergirl who insists that she was such a geek in high school, only to blow the “Me? Beautiful?” façade by adding, “No, really, I was a total geek,” as if she, too, finds it hard to believe that someone as hot as her could have ever been less so. No, this is the genuine shock of a middle-aged woman who had long ago resigned herself to a lifetime of invisibility.
So you can understand our consternation: Which is the real Phyllis? Phyllis Lapin-Vance could just as easily be that woman from accounting who shares a cube wall with you and wears old-lady perfume and God-awful Christmas sweaters and spends hours on the phone, planning special trips to Orlando for herself and her husband. And Phyllis Smith seemed like she could be that same person, but now we’re not so sure. The line between Phyllis Smith and Phyllis Lapin-Vance is pretty fuzzy to begin with, and honestly, with all this jumping back and forth between the two, we’re starting to confuse ourselves.
Smith’s co-workers at The Office aren’t much help, either. “She knows her character perfectly,” says Greg Daniels, the series’ producer, which we’re pretty sure he meant as a compliment but, for our money, sounds like another way of saying that Phyllis Smith is a lot like Phyllis Lapin-Vance.
And then Creed Bratton, who plays Creed Bratton, the office nutjob, offers this: “She carries a small Beretta in her purse. She’s so mild-mannered that you won’t see it coming, but if pushed, she could off someone. I love her, and I fear her,” which we’re only including because we’re a little worried how a guy like that might react if he found out that we interviewed him but didn’t bother to quote him.
OK, go to the source, right? Ask Phyllis herself how she’s different from her character—that should clear everything up, shouldn’t it? Not really: “I think I know myself better than she does,” Smith says, which is sort of revealing but mainly just a verbal confirmation of that vague distinction that separates the two. Yep, this is going to be interesting.
Now might be a good time to take a break and explain how we came to be eating lunch with Phyllis Smith in St. Louis in the first place. Normally, setting up one of these celebrity sit-downs is a relatively boring process of exchanging several voice mails with a manager or agent or assistant or publicist, who anyone with an extra $19.95 a month and a membership to IMDbPro can track down relatively easily. This is why you don’t typically read about the process of setting up a celebrity sit-down in a celebrity profile. It’s just not all that interesting, not even in a “pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard” sort of way.
But the process of setting up a sit-down with Phyllis Smith was not your typical affair. To start with, she has neither a manager nor an agent nor an assistant nor a publicist, primarily because this acting thing is still pretty new to her. We managed to get around that, but actually convincing Smith to agree to lunch and a photo shoot was another matter entirely. That’s not to say she was rude; the opposite was true. Pleasant emails were exchanged, schedules were checked (she was still in the process of wrapping up filming for the third season of The Office but was planning a trip home for the summer), a location and time for lunch were decided upon.
And then things got a little tricky: Would she be able to make time for a photo shoot, preferably at a photographer’s studio? She would be able to make time, but could the photographer just take the pictures at the restaurant? Or better yet, could we just use stock photos from NBC? We could do that, but if it wasn’t too much trouble, we thought maybe a professional photo shoot would work best.
A compromise was reached, in which Smith agreed to walk a couple of blocks after lunch to the Washington Avenue Post, which, with its copy machines and stacks of paper, was as close as we were going to get to re-creating an office environment.
Now, given what we already knew about Smith—which was, admittedly, not much and based almost exclusively on the personality and actions of the character she plays on the show—she did not seem the type to big-time us or play the intentionally difficult diva card, making her caginess about the pictures all the more difficult to understand. We got our answer at lunch: “Sorry I gave you so much trouble about setting something up for the photo shoot,” she explained after we sat down. “But I saw a story somewhere about a model in L.A. who went to a photo shoot and then disappeared.” She looked a little sheepish, but she went on. “They found her body a week later. I guess I just figured I should be careful about what I was getting myself into.”
In keeping with the theme of unpredictability that would color the majority of our interaction, though, once she was confident that we were not, in fact, going to make her the star of her very own tawdry true crime story, she told us just about anything we could have wanted to know, including how the dating game is treating her. “No one’s ever asked me about that,” she said, a little surprised by the question. “Right now, I’m just not in a relationship. I’ve met a couple Mr. Almosts, but no Mr. Right.”
Phyllis Lapin-Vance has had some success lately—she became a hyphenate when she married refrigerator repairman Bob Vance at the end of the third season—so could there be a Bob Vance out there for Phyllis Smith?
“There probably is. I’m sure there might be,” she said. “But he hasn’t come to service my refrigerator yet!” She laughed—hard. Snort! “OH! Oh no, this is going to come back to haunt me now!”
And now for the plot twist that turns the whole story upside down: Smith had a brush with fame as a burlesque dancer when she was in her twenties.
She grew up in South City, not far from the Carondelet branch of the St. Louis Public Library on Michigan Avenue, where, as a kid, she made regular trips with her mother. The books were great and all, but the thing that really lit her fuse was the dance studio next door. She was a shy little girl, but there was something about watching those women jump and twirl and glide around the room that made her feel bigger than herself. She could do that, she thought—or at least she wanted to try. So she asked her mother if she could take lessons. “No, not right now.” She asked again. “No, maybe next time.” She asked again, and finally, this time her mother relented—but Phyllis would have to do it on her own. It wasn’t that her mother disapproved; she just wanted to see if Phyllis would come out of her shell long enough to actually follow through with it. And she did. “I remember, as a 7-year-old, getting up on a chair to get down the phone book,” she says. “I looked up the number, and I remember talking to my dance teacher’s husband and very shyly trying to find out how much it cost.”
She started with ballet, and then a year later, added tap. Jazz came three years later. And then she just did it all. It didn’t exactly get her over her shyness at school or at home, but when she was out there dancing, boy, she came alive. It was her outlet. “I had one teacher tell my mom that I was like two different people when I was onstage and offstage,” she says. “When I was onstage, she said I really ‘beamed.’”
And as she remembers those early years, a whole other Phyllis takes over, one that isn’t afraid to brag on herself a little bit. “When I was onstage, that’s where I was confident, because I knew I was good,” she says. “You know how when you know you’re good at something ... I knew I was good, and I loved it so much, and it came from a place of joy, so that was where I was most comfortable.”
And that’s where she stayed. She learned from the best—her first instructor, Marjorie Mendolia, had been a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo—and eventually joined the St. Louis Civic Ballet and then the St. Louis Dance Theatre. But when she got to high school and everyone else she knew pulled up stakes and moved east to try to make it in New York, she stayed behind. She just couldn’t leave. “I knew that I was proficient technically, but I was also smart enough to know that I wasn’t emotionally ready to leave home,” she says. “I didn’t think I would be able to survive New York all by myself at 18 years old.”
She says she’s not really one to waste a lot of time on regret, so getting her to talk about what might have been isn’t easy. Maybe she would have tried out for the Rockettes—she was the right height, after all—but who’s knows?
Instead she eventually found work at Mrs. Mendolia’s studio, teaching at night, until she hooked up with a traveling vaudeville duo and moved out to Long Beach, Calif., to revamp an old Broadway burlesque show. For a year, she sang, danced and even worked on her comedic timing. It was more or less what she’d always dreamed of. And just like that, she was a working dancer.
And then she hurt her knee. It was a move she’d done a hundred times before, but this was the time it went wrong: She finished her cancan number with a jump split, but when she came down, her foot caught on the center seam of the stage and twisted her leg. Her knee buckled under the full weight of her body and tore her ACL. And it was all over. She’s almost unnervingly calm when she talks about it now, calling it “very disappointing” without elaborating. Time and perspective have no doubt lessened the blow. She says she knew her career was winding down anyway—she was in her thirties when it happened—but that didn’t make it any easier to accept at the time. “Oddly enough, I made a decision in my mind that because I loved it so much, that if I couldn’t dance professionally, I wasn’t going to dance at all.”
She wasn’t about to come home, so she did the responsible thing and found another job to pay the bills. She found work, ironically enough, as a receptionist and made a little extra money selling tickets at a movie theater. It wasn’t ideal, but she got by until she lucked into a job as a casting associate and fell into a groove.
In a brief, post–dancing career moment of brazen self-confidence, Smith had the following thought while working as a casting associate and auditioning actors for the U.S. version of The Office: “I can do this.” The way she grins and averts her eyes as she recalls that uncharacteristic psychological indiscretion, it seems that even now, having long since secured the job and proven that she’s more than capable of holding her own with Carell and Co., she’s still just a little uncomfortable admitting that she once had the stones to be so brash.
That was the first time in more than 12 years in the casting business that that thought had ever crossed her mind. She’s careful not to let on how she feels about the casting associates who have used the job as a springboard to bigger and better things—or just called in a favor to weasel their way into a production—but she will say how she operated. She did the work. She put in the 12-hour days on the set of shows like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. But, she says, she never asked whether there was a role for her.
This we find a little hard to believe, not because she strikes us as a particularly Machiavellian woman but because she was once a dancer, and well, it would seem to us that a one-time performer who works as a casting director yet never tries out for a part would be as common as a recovered alcoholic who spends his days as a cashier in a liquor store and never thinks to taste any of the inventory. “I really hadn’t,” she says with a shrug. “I thought that ship had sailed. There was never an ulterior motive. I just hadn’t thought of using casting as a vehicle to get into acting.”
Come on. Not even once was there the smallest part of you that thought—
“No,” she stops us politely, as if to signal that this portion of the conversation is over. “I completely thought I wasn’t a viable product.”
And that’s probably why—even though she thought this was a show in which she might be able to find herself a part, if she were inclined to audition—it was a very smart decision on the part of Ken Kwapis, who directed the pilot for The Office, to not let Smith know that he was secretly auditioning her for a role. She may have had the nerve to imagine herself as a member of the cast, but actually putting herself out there to get the part? Huh-uh.
So just like she’d done in every one of her other casting jobs, she read with the auditioning actors. She read the part of Pam, the bored secretary now played by Nerinx Hall grad Jenna Fischer. Then, strangely enough, she read the parts of Jim and Dwight. And she never knew that it was her performance that Kwapis was watching. “I’m glad I didn’t know, because I probably would have been really nervous,” she says. “I was already nervous, but not because I thought I was auditioning. I was just thinking, ‘Please let me do a good job so I bring out the best in these guys.’”
She did a good job. So good that she got herself a part, even if she didn’t really believe it at first. (She found out by way of a character breakdown that was faxed to the casting department.) “Then wardrobe called—and I knew from working in casting that when wardrobe calls you, it constitutes a work call—and they say, ‘Hey, I understand you’re playing the character of Phyllis.’ And I said, ‘Yes I am.’”
Ironically enough, it was just before she got the part of Phyllis that Smith was getting ready to leave Hollywood. She’d loved her job, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Twelve years into it, she still hadn’t made the leap to casting director. “All those years, people liked my work as an associate, but I never played the political game to make the leap over to the [casting] director game,” she says. “And if you don’t have someone who will say, ‘You know, I’m too busy, but this person will do the job,’ if it’s not handed off, you kind of have to go around the back door. And that was never part of my game. I never wanted to undermine somebody to get a job. So as a result, I was always an associate.”
But then everything changed. She was performing again. She was making money—nothing obscene, but enough that she could send some home to her parents and still not have to worry about her own financial situation like she had since her dancing career ended.
What was the first thing you bought yourself?
She laughs. “A pair of nice shoes. I went shopping with two makeup ladies in Beverly Hills—I never go shopping in Beverly Hills. I’d literally buy $19 pairs of shoes at Famous-Barr. But they talked me into it, and they were like $200—that’s a lot of money for me. And then I went and did this red-carpet event in Los Angeles, and I wore my new shoes. I opened the door, took a step, and one of the heels pops off. For some reason, I’d decided to stick my $19 pair of shoes in my purse, and I flipped them out and wore those. That’s from being a dancer—that’s from Mrs. Mendolia saying, ‘Always be prepared.’”
Once we’ve had a chance to let this all soak in, we talk with Smith again, at the end of her summer vacation in St. Louis, and a few things have changed. For one, she may have found an agent. Up until now, it hadn’t really felt right to have representation, she says, because she was only just starting out, and she didn’t know what was going to happen with the show, and she didn’t know what was going to happen with her career …
Long story short, she’s ready to start actively looking for some work in movies now. (“That bug,” she says, “whatever that thing is that drives performers, it’s been rekindled.”) So when she went to New York for some press events in May and happened to meet an agent at an NBC party who sounded like she might be looking to take on a new client, Smith got her number. She’s going to call and “see if she was just talking party talk or if she was serious about it.”
There’s something else, though. She’s going to start dancing again. She was just thinking about it the other day, in fact. More than20 years after she had to walk away from the one thing that she’d loved more than anything else since she was 7 years old and give up that part of her that made her feel like she stood out a little in a crowd, she’s going to give it a shot again. But this time, she knows who she is. She’s kind of got her little place in the world carved out.
“In my casting life, it was nothing to work 12-hour days, so Monday through Friday, you’re getting up and going to work. Please don’t misinterpret—I loved my casting work and being with actors, but it was a full, 12-hour day. So I don’t think I would have had the energy that I have now. There’s just a pressure that’s off now, so it frees you up to do other things that you want to do just because you love them.”
She doesn’t really need the dance to define her.
“I’m just going to do it for the joy. Not for any reason other than the joy of it. Not for the exercise, just because it’s in my being.”
office mates
With the exception of the lovable prankster Jim Halpert, Phyllis Lapin-Vance works with a cast of nerds, putzes, sycophants and socially awkward psychos—in other words, her office is a lot like yours. We asked Phyllis Smith to play “Screw, Marry, Kill” with three of the worst. The rules were simple: Given only these chuckle-heads to choose from, whom would she sleep with, whom would she marry and whom would she murder?
Michael Scott: Screw
Sleeping with the boss would have its benefits, but Smith wasn’t thinking about getting ahead. She likes that he’s her age, but more importantly, he seems to be pleasing his current girlfriend, recently fired corporate bigwig Jan Levinson, so he might not be too bad, right?
Dwight Schrute: Marry
For the same reason that your average Office fan might want to permanently pink-slip the creepy Schrute—he farms beets and has a terrarium full of lizards, for crying out loud—Smith would want to hire him full-time. “I think he’s so weird that we’d always have something interesting going on.”
Andy Bernard: Kill
Actually, Smith offered to off Angela Martin, Dunder-Mifflin’s resident judgmental taskmaster, before we even gave her the choices (easy, tiger!), but once we brought up hotheaded suck-up Bernard, she adjusted her hit list: “I just don’t like that character at all.”
