The Cast of The Paper on Character Development, Comedy, and Their Brand New Season

Words: Jenn Lehwald | Photography: Lewis Vorn | Styling: Katy Cutbirth | Chelsea Frei Makeup: Kenneth Soh | Chelsea Frei Hair: Kelsey Gustovitch | Gbemisola Ikumelo Makeup: Tay Rivera | Gbemisola Ikumelo Hair: Porshawna Mosely | Ramona Young Makeup: Sarah Nelson | Ramona Young Hair: Ryan Burrell | Sabrina Impacciatore Hair: Andrew Ly | Sabrina Impacciatore Makeup: Sabrina Rinaldi | Special Thanks: Margaret Crane, Alex Wong and Olivia Cooper at Universal TV

Make it stand out

Until you’ve experienced it first-hand, it’s hard to appreciate just how many moving parts go into a major TV production on the scale of The Paper. Any big network show is the same - huge amounts of crew members, a craft services that would bring a tear to the eye - though The Paper is especially storied. It is, after all, a workplace comedy, set within the universe of The Office, following the staff of The Truth Teller, a struggling newspaper in Toledo, Ohio.

Back in March, Polyester got a taste of life at The Paper, to truly understand what goes into making the final product - we visited the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles to shoot on location with the cast. There was something slightly surreal about watching the cast and crew go about their working day. Sets built out with such detail you’d be convinced you were standing in a real office space, golf carts ready to take you from one end of the lot to another, and a seemingly endless number of people working tirelessly to bring The Paper to life.

Not many television shows come with a legacy quite as large as The Office. For its successor, that connection was both an invitation for success and a potential burden. Season 1 was made under the very specific pressure of knowing that every part of the show would inevitably be viewed through the lens of what came before. Would audiences accept it? Would they compare it endlessly? Or was it really possible for it to feel like a TV show of its own? 

"I think we were all so nervous in Season 1," Chelsea Frei, whose character Mare Pritti has emerged as one of the show's stand-outs, tells me over a phone call. "It was such a different beast from Season 2 because [Season 1] was so secretive, and we knew there were going to be so many comparisons to The Office. We were just hoping people would see it for what it was."

“What is this new thing that we're building and creating? What is it actually gonna look like?"

For Chelsea, the anxiety was intensified by her own relationship with the original series. "The Office is my favourite show of all time," she says. "I remember laughing every day on set, but also thinking, 'Oh my God, I hope we don't ruin the legacy that is The Office.'" There was a sense of being surrounded by people she had "known and looked up to for so much of my career", while simultaneously being handed the responsibility of creating something that would inevitably be measured against them.

Ramona Young, who plays Nicole Lee, the sharp yet introverted circulation staffer, remembers the feeling too. For her, much of Season 1 was spent holding her breath. "Are people gonna like it? Are people gonna compare us constantly? Are we gonna cave under the pressure?" she recalls wondering. "What is this new thing that we're building and creating? What is it actually gonna look like?"

“"Once it came out, once we got the reviews, coming into Season 2 was really like a breath of fresh air. I feel settled, and now I feel like I can play. I feel like we can have more fun."

But by the time the cast returned for Season 2, something had shifted; the show had survived its introduction to the world. More importantly, it had been received as something more than an extension of The Office; audiences had begun to understand the distinction that the cast themselves had been trying to articulate all along: The Paper might exist within that wider universe, but it had developed a personality of its own.

"Once it came out, once we got the reviews, coming into Season 2 was really like a breath of fresh air” Ramona tells me over Zoom. “Like, okay, I feel settled, and now I feel like I can play. I feel like we can have more fun."

The first season had been about proving the concept - establishing the workplace, introducing its characters and figuring out how all of these very different personalities could coexist. Season 2, as Ramona puts it, is what happens when everyone already knows the rules. "Now that we understand that, let's throw them all in a box, shake it up, toss it in the air and see what happens."

That sense of play is apparent in the way the cast talks about the show now. There is less defensiveness around the question of The Office and more curiosity about what The Paper can do when it stops looking over its shoulder.

That shift is something Gbemisola Ikumelo, who plays Adelola Olofin, a smart but unbothered accountant pulled from her routine into the newspaper team, has felt in her own character. As the show has found its footing, so has Adelola. Ikumelo says she initially saw the character as studious and hardworking, before realising there was something more interesting underneath. "What if she's peaked too soon?" she remembers thinking. Adelola, she came to realise, had gone to college and burned herself out, taking the job at the newspaper as "a means to an end" - a way of "adulting" without completely disappointing her parents. This arc gave the character somewhere to go, particularly as the people around her began to inspire her to step outside the "I don't want to be here" shell she'd built around herself.

That freedom to evolve extends across the cast. Sabrina Impacciatore, who appears as Esmeralda Grand, the eccentric managing editor of The Truth Teller, describes the show as "a kind of live creature that keeps changing every second." For Esmeralda, that means something as simple as what appears to be a rock solid self-confidence can begin to crack. "She's very aggressive, she looks self-confident - of course she's not - and she's very unfair," Sabrina says. "But in this season, I could finally show another side of her." For the first time in the series, Esmeralda begins to question how other people see her, giving Sabrina the chance to explore the vulnerability beneath all the bravado. "She was questioning herself," she says. "It was kind of innocent, this way of Esmeralda understanding for the first time that people perceive her in a way that she cannot even imagine."

It's that kind of willingness to throw themselves into the unknown that seems to define the cast now. But the nerves of Season 1 haven't disappeared entirely - Sabrina admits she was "very, very scared" of joining something connected to The Office, and even struggled to sleep after watching Season 2 - but the nerves no longer seem to dictate the way the actors approach the work. There is a confidence amongst the cast now in knowing that the show has earned the right to stand alone. 

And perhaps that's why the show's separation from The Office feels more significant now than it did when Season 1 began. The Paper no longer needs to prove that it isn't The Office. What began as a question of whether audiences would accept a new show within a familiar universe has become something much more interesting: a group of people figuring out what they can do once they're finally allowed to make the thing their own.