Oscar Nuñez Talks About Returning for THE OFFICE Spinoff THE PAPER and How His Character Has Evolved

Oscar Nuñez is best known for his role of Oscar Martinez on the faux-docuseries The Office, and he is the one holdover character who has returned to reprise that part in the new series The Paper, which takes place in the same world as its predecessor.

Now, Nuñez has sat down with Variety to talk about how his involvement came about, and he said it all started with a lunch about a year ago.

The actor went out to eat with his old pal Greg Daniels, who adapted the American version of The Office, and Daniels told him, “I’m working on a new show. How would you feel about coming back as Oscar?”

“I’m game. Of course,” said Nuñez, not thinking much of it. He’d go on to meet with Daniels a few more times as the writer-producer fleshed out his idea.

“At one point, Daniels told Nuñez he wanted paper — the product for sale at Dunder Mifflin, around which The Office revolved — to be a central component of the new project. Eventually, Daniels took Nuñez to meet the writers. “Oh no,” Nuñez remembers thinking. “This is really happening.”

“I was a little nervous when we first started,” Nuñez said about the upcoming series. “I didn’t know who the characters were, what the episodes would be, how it would all roll out.” His concerns were assuaged when he arrived on set and witnessed the cast and crew’s careful attention to detail.

He specifically brings up Domnhall Gleeson, who plays the paper’s starry-eyed new boss, Ned Sampson. “He’s a very thoughtful young man,” Nuñez says. “He really cared about his character and asked a lot of questions. I thought that was very cool.”

The Office ended in 2013, but seven years after it went off the air, it became by far the most-streamed show in America. The workplace comedy, an adaptation of the British cult hit co-created and led by Ricky Gervais, turned a handful of its cast members into household names.

As for Nuñez, it catapulted the Cuban-born actor from an unknown day player into a fixture on one of the biggest TV shows of all time. For nearly two decades, Nuñez has not been able to leave his house without a stranger yelling “Oscar!” (It helps that he shares his character’s first name.)

In the years following its finale, as he fielded constant questions about reboot rumors and spinoff ideas, Nuñez continued to embrace his character, introducing himself as “Oscar from The Office” on Cameo and appearing at fan conventions alongside his former castmates. But when the new show premieres, it will bring the character back on television and behind an office desk for the first time in more than a decade.

Nuñez is thrilled, but Oscar Martinez, not so much. In the first episode of The Paper, the accountant is dismayed to find the same documentary crew that stalked him in Scranton prowling around his new workplace. In the first episode, he tells off a camera man: “You can’t use my voice, my likeness, my face, nothing!”

A title card begs to differ: “Yes we can. There’s no end date on the release Oscar signed in 2005.”

“Oscar is not in his early 20s. He doesn’t have to be on Instagram,” Nuñez says. “He is a pseudo-intellectual. He wants to do his job and find a boyfriend and go to some plays. He wants to enjoy his life without being in a documentary. Some people don’t want to be actors. They’re very happy just having a quiet life.”

After The Office ended, Nuñez said in interviews that he imagined Oscar might one day leave Dunder Mifflin and run for political office. But The Paper finds him more or less where we left him, albeit in a different city.

“His company was bought by a bigger company, and they decided to keep him on board,” Nuñez says of his character. “‘You want to keep working for this company? You’re going to have to relocate.’ It’s the same fella but in a different city, probably making more money if he negotiated properly.”

But while he works a back-office job as a bean counter, removed from the daily duties of publishing a newspaper, the revitalization of the Toledo Truth Teller stirs something in Oscar, who chooses to get involved.

“Does he just want to make a buck and be cynical, or does he want to do something? We’ll have to wait and see,” Nuñez teases.

Reminiscing about his favorite episodes of The Office, Nuñez brings up “Gay Witch Hunt,” the Season 3 premiere in which Michael Scott (Steve Carell) learns Oscar is gay and — in a horribly misguided attempt to prove he’s comfortable with his employee’s sexuality — kisses him on the lips in front of the entire office.

To many fans’ surprise, Oscar was not initially conceived as a gay character. Sometime before the Season 2 episode “The Secret,” Nuñez remembers Daniels approaching him and saying, “Can I ask you something? Do you mind if we make your character gay?” Nuñez said, “No, I don’t care,” and Daniels replied, “Oh, good, because we already wrote the scripts.”

In the 20 years since, Oscar has become a queer icon of sorts. “I often forget my character is gay,” Nuñez says, “and I’ll go to a convention and young people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you. Your character helped me come out of the closet.’ It’s very cool,” Nuñez says. “That’s the best part about it.”

I got to see the first episode of The Paper, and it’s a lot of fun to see Oscar return. He is so funny in the role, and this new cast is full of wild characters that already have me cracking up. I look forward to seeing where the story goes.

The whole first season of The Paper will be available to watch on Peacock on September 4th.