“The Office” actress Angela Kinsey recently recalled a time she refused to say a scripted line on the well-known NBC sitcom in reference to a gay character that she didn’t believe accurately portrayed the love of Christ or Christians. During an April 23 episode of “The Office” co-star with Rainn Wilson’s podcast “Soul Boom,” Kinsey discussed the years she played Angela Martin on the series that aired from 2005 to 2013.
Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute, asked Kinsey about her real-life relationship with God and her views on the church, saying her character was known as an “uptight Christian cat lady.” Kinsey revealed that she grew up Christian, and her mother taught Sunday school and still leads a weekly Bible study. On a few occasions, she said there were jokes written for her character that she felt didn’t authentically portray Christians. In one episode during the show’s third season, she recalled that she was supposed to say a “super judgy” line against Oscar, an openly gay character on the show. Kinsey said the line wasn’t what any Christian would really say. She discussed her concerns with producer and showrunner Greg Daniels.
She said, “Yeah, actually, there were one or two times in which there would be a joke written for her that I thought was just really stereotypical, maybe one note. I like to think of her as a full, well-rounded person. I do remember, I remember there was a particular storyline between Angela and Oscar, where Angela was being super judgy. I never went up to Greg about any joke, but there was a joke at Oscar’s expense, and I went up to Greg [Daniels], and I was like, ‘I can’t.’” She told Daniels, “I just was like, ‘I don’t feel good about it. I don’t feel good about that. I don’t feel like that’s what Jesus represented to me.'”
Kinsey continued, “And he was like, ‘OK.’ And he heard me, and he took the joke out. And the episode, it was ‘Gay Witch Hunt,’ had so many already. But that’s the one pivotal moment I remember being like, ‘OK, this is feeling like a stereotype and very one note.’ I feel like she has more depth than that.” To this day, Kinsey said, “Prayer is still important in my family.” She said her mother would read the Bible to her, and her family would frequently say “grace” at dinners. Questioning why people only say “grace” during a meal, Wilson, who grew up as a member of the Baha’i faith, then led Kinsey in prayer for the podcast.
“First time grace has been said for a podcast,” Wilson said. “That we know of,” Kinsey responded. Wilson published his book, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, in April 2023. The actor made headlines last May when he called out Hollywood for having an “anti-Christian bias.” He tweeted, “I do think there is an anti-Christian bias in Hollywood. As soon as the David character in ‘The Last of Us’ started reading from the Bible I knew that he was going to be a horrific villain. Could there be a Bible-reading preacher on a show who is actually loving and kind?”