Angela Kinsey and Brian Baumgartner Talk Office BFFs, Work Wives and Beer

You can learn a lot about a person after sitting across from them for years and that’s exactly what Angela Kinsey and Brian Baumgartner say happened to them after eight years spent on-set at the fictional paper company depicted in the hilarious NBC hit sitcom, The Office.

And, while they’re celebrating Bring Your Beer to Work Day today, by partnering with Heineken 0.0, a new alcohol-free beverage, in a new ad campaign, the two actually see each other a lot, despite the fact that The Office has been off the air since 2013 and, with it, their roles in the Dunder Mifflin accounting department.

“You were by my house a few months ago,” says Kinsey, who played Angela Martin on The Office, of Baumgartner, who played Kevin Malone. “We all have kids and are busy but we make an effort every few months to get together.”

So, since these two are experts on all things office, we had to ask: What’s the best thing about an office BFF?

“I think that person should be a good sounding board and should also be a judgment free zone,” Kinsey says. “To be a good office BFF, you’ve got to think ‘I’m your work wife,’ ‘I’m your work husband’ and it’s all good here.”

For Baumgartner, it comes down to having someone to escape with. In his case, that person was John Krasinski, who played Jim Halpert on the show.

“If you asked people on set who was Brian’s best friend, it would be John,” Baumgartner says. “Every single day, no joke, everyone else would eat together and John and I never did. We went into John’s trailer and played Madden Football. Every day. I think a BFF at work should be someone that you can escape work with. You can work really hard on a huge project but that person can also be a distraction from all that.”

As for Kinsey’s BFF from The Office? It was—and still is Jenna Fischer, who played Pam Beesley, on the show.

“We ate lunch together every day in her trailer because her table was better than mine,” Kinsey says, adding that, to this day, she talks to Fischer every single day.

“I sort of joke with my husband that I can’t relate to things happening in my life until I run it by Jenna,” she says. “We didn’t know each other before The Office, but we just hit it off. They could barely put us in scenes together because we would laugh so much.”