The Office stars Oscar Nuñez and Kate Flannery scored big on Thursday’s season finale of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The actors, playing for Planned Parenthood and Philadelphia food bank Philabundance, won the coveted $1 million prize.
On the game show, the duo reached the final question: “The word ‘planet’ comes from an ancient Greek word that literally means what?” Flannery selected “Wanderer” while Nuñez was so stressed out he lay down on the floor of the studio. Host Jimmy Kimmel milked the moment, delaying confirming that their answer was correct for a very tense minute.
After Kimmel announced the pair had won, Flannery exclaimed, “What is happening? What is happening? What the hell, you guys? Oh my God.” The actors then accepted a giant check on behalf of their causes as confetti fell.
During the competition, Nuñez and Flannery used their Phone-a-Friend to call The Office co-star Brian Baumgartner, making it a true Dunder Mifflin reunion.
Nuñez’s reunion with Flannery on Millionaire comes after he reprised his role as Oscar Martinez on Peacock‘s The Office spinoff The Paper, which debuted earlier this month. The comedy series stars Domhnall Gleeson, Sabrina Imappaciatore, Alex Edelman, Gbemisola Ikumelo, and Chelsea Frei.
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The Paper co-creators recently told Rolling Stone they first approached Nuñez “years ago” about coming back as Oscar. “I first pitched this in 2017,” Greg Daniels said. “The Office was really big on Netflix. It was the number one show on Netflix from 2016 to 2020, I think. At the time, there was a lot of pressure [for a spinoff], but I couldn’t do it yet because I was running a show called Upload for Amazon. But I didn’t want them to start thinking about someone else to come be brought in. So I planted my flag saying, ‘This is going to be about journalism, and Oscar is going to be the character.’
He added, “I met with Oscar and said to him, ‘Tell me if you’re about to take something that would interfere with this because maybe we’ll come up with some kind of holding deal.’ But I always thought that Oscar was the right character. Because so many of the other Office characters in the finale had a closure to their character arcs. They were going into different fields and they were going to different cities. Oscar still worked at Dunder Mifflin and didn’t have an enormous change in who he was.”
