The Office's Brian Baumgartner explains how his childhood injury helped him bag this role

 Brian Baumgartner is well-known for his iconic role in the NBC sitcom The Office. The actor has opened up about how his childhood injury helped him bag the role in The Office. Brian Baumgartner in The Office portrays the role of Kevin Malone. The 48-year old actor made an appearance on Nick Viall's podcast, The Viall Files, on Wednesday and opened up about how the injury, which landed him in a wheelchair for some time, disrupted his dreams of being a baseball player but also gave him something good to cherish. 

Brian Baumgartner talks about his role in The Office

Talking about his role in The Office, Brian mentioned that he was attracted to the show after watching the original UK version. "I called my agent and said this is the show, she said to me they are looking for unknown people but they are not looking for you unknown — like totally unknown … but my manager worked and worked and got me a meeting with the casting director Allison Jones," he said.

Baumgartner talked about his dream and how it was trashed after his injury. He said, "If I had an early dream, it was that I was going to be a professional baseball player — all sports really, but baseball was really it for me — but my bone was twisted in my leg from birth, this was the kind of thing I could have lived with forever... my foot was slightly rotated from my knee". Brian added, "It wasn't dramatic, it was something that I could have lived with, but if you want to be a professional baseball player, no, you need everything aligned and to be able to run fast."

Brian explains about his surgery gone wrong

Brian explained that he tried to opt for surgery to fix the issue however something went wrong during the procedure. He said, "Basically what happened was they did the surgery, they put the splint on, they put the cast on to keep the leg in place and there was either some chemical mis-mixture or the cast got really hot at the pressure point … something went wrong but for days I was experiencing pain and [the doctors] were like 'He's fine, give him some morphine and then eventually they were like, 'well he shouldn't be feeling this.'  Brian revealed that they had to cut the cast off and it had burned through his Achilles tendon at the back of his leg.