You never forget your first Christening for a fake baby.
On the October 5 episode of Office Ladies, Stitcher’s The Office rewatch podcast, hosts Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey chatted all about the Season 7 episode, “Christening.” In it, the Dunder Mifflin crew celebrates Jim and Pam’s baby, Cece, who was sometimes played by real-life twins Bailey and Sienna Strull, and other times played by a “creepy jelly baby.”
The former co-stars and current BFFs shared their memories of Jelly Baby Cece, told fans when they could get a good look, and talked about one of the creepiest fake babies of all time — the baby from American Sniper.
When thinking back to scenes with the Strull twins, Kinsey said, “I just couldn’t get enough of those little girls. Those babies were so cute.” Fischer agreed, but shared that they “used the creepy jelly baby” several times during the episode.
“Oh, I caught it,” Kinsey said assuredly.
“Yeah. [Prop master] Phil Shea got it for us. They’re really expensive. We’ve talked about these before. They’re like thousands of dollars. And we had to be careful with them. I have some catches — some jelly baby catches,” Fischer said. “But in these opening scenes, it was all Bailey and Sienna.”
If you want to get a good glimpse at the jelly baby, Kinsey and Fischer suggest keeping your eyes peeled around the 5:55 mark. “During this whole scene, I had Jelly Baby. And I hope you noted some of the ways that I was trying to move Jelly Baby to make it look like it was a real baby,” Fischer said.
“You were, like, bobbing her on your knee,” Kinsey observed.
“Yeah. And, like, kind of moving her arm with my thumb,” Fischer added. “Lady. This reminded me of the most famous jelly baby in a movie. Do you remember it?”
“Oh, I do, I do…because Josh and I were like, ‘This is ridiculous. This is a big budget movie.'” Kinsey said.
“Bradley Cooper in American Sniper,” Fischer confirmed. “He does a lot of the same kind of jelly baby stuff I was doing. Like there’s one part, I rewatched it, where he you see him take his thumb and move the baby’s arm. But this was like an emotional scene.”
“Yeah. And that baby was so distracting. I felt like he was doing a really good performance, but all I could look at was this jelly baby,” Kinsey recalled.
“I have a great photo of our jelly baby. It was in between scenes. It was pretty hot, because they kept turning off the air when we would film. I was in the main part of the church sitting area. You were up on the pews. And I looked over at you and you looked at me and the jelly baby had flopped over, kind of falling off your lap. And I took your picture. It’s in our book, The Office BFFs. It cracks me up every time I see it,” Kinsey told Fischer.
“I love that we have that picture, because Jelly Baby was a big part of my life starting now till the end of the show,” Fischer said.
“Yeah. You spent a lot of time with Jelly Baby,” Kinsey replied.
“And then you did too,” Fischer said, referencing Kinsey’s character Angela Martin eventually having her own baby in the show.
Be sure to listen to the full episode of Office Ladies to hear more behind-the-scenes stories about “The Christening.”
