Cast of ‘The Office’ personally cleared sample used in Billie Eilish’s ‘My Strange Addiction’

The track uses dialogue from the episode "Threat Level Midnight"

The cast of the US version of The Office personally cleared a sample from the show that was used in Billie Eilish’s ‘My Strange Addiction’.

The track, which appears on the pop star’s first album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’, featured clips of dialogue from the episode “Threat Level Midnight”.

In that episode of the sitcom, boss Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) airs his finished movie, in which he plays secret agent Michael Scarn, for his employees. One scene finds him doing a dance called the Scarn in a bar. Eilish has previously said that the beat for the track reminded her of the dance, inspiring her and her brother/co-writer and co-producer Finneas O’Connell to interject samples of the show into it. 

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Speaking to Rolling Stone, B.J. Novak, who played Ryan Howard in the show and also served as one of its writers and producers, said Eilish had to get the approval “of all the cast that was on it” before the sample would be cleared. Carrell, Howard, John Krasinski (Jim Halpert), and Mindy Kaling’s (Kelly Kapoor) voices all appear on the track.

“I was fine with it regardless,” Howard said of his decision to approve the use of his voice. “But I was like, ‘Wow, bonus: This is a banger.’” He added that he had already had Eilish’s song ‘Bury A Friend’ on a playlist before she had requested permission to use the sample.

“One of the funnier meta jokes is that, in Michael Scott’s delusion, of course this would become sampled on a Number One album and done at touchdown end zone dances,” Novak continued. “You know in Michael Scott’s delusional fantasy this would happen, and in a way it did in the real world.”

Meanwhile, Eilish recently revealed that, up until recently, she thought the Spice Girls were a fictional band. The 17-year-old singer was introduced to the girl group through their 1998 movie Spice World and believed it to be “a made-up movie about a group of girls who sang.”

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