It was pretty shocking when Parks and Recreation revealed everyone's favorite scapegoat Jerry Gergich's awesome home life, and the identity of his wife, Gayle (oh, only supermodel CHRISTIE BRINKLEY). After she was introduced, I immediately wanted the series to just hire her full-time and give her some wacky story lines because poor Jerry deserves it after having a pie smushed in his face in Season 4 — but since that's not going to happen (probably), this is good enough. In a new interview with The Huffington Post, Jerry himself, Jim O'Heir revealed that he and Christie Brinkley have become e-mail buddies since that episode aired:
They told me, "We're going to go for a Christine Brinkley-type." Then I heard through the rumor mill that they actually called Christine Brinkley and it turned out her daughter was a big fan of the show. Christine Brinkley, that's my age range of supermodels. That's on my radar. This isn't someone where I don't know who she is. She turned out to be such a bright light. She walks into a room and just lights it up. She's just that person. We have a lot of laughs. I'm proud to say that we're email buddies. She's really awesome.
How adorable is that? Someone get Christie Brinkley back on his show now.
O'Heir also reveals that in the beginning of the series, there was no Jerry, and he was just hired because producers like his audition for Ron Swanson so much that they wanted to keep him around on the show:
In the beginning, the role of Jerry was that there was no Jerry. I had auditioned for Ron Swanson, like everybody else did, and they liked whatever they liked about me. Greg Daniels said, "Just put him at a desk and let's see what happens." I had an occasional line here or there. At the end of the Season 1, though, Amy and I ended up in the forest and we just played around. From what I understand, the producers said to my manager later that they were like, "OK, he can play this game with us. He can handle himself."
Just think — it was that which led to this:
You can check out the rest of O'Heir's interview over at The Huffington Post here.
