Parks & Recreation ranks among the top sitcoms of recent decades. And while there are legions of fans who will go to bat for the hit NBC show, actor Jim O’Heir is the first to sing its praises.

“Anyone who knows me knows that I will talk about Parks & Rec until I’m blue in the face, literally non-stop,” he recently told DECIDER during a Zoom call. “It truly was this amazing experience that I’m forever grateful for.”

That’s why it comes as no surprise that O’Heir was the first Parks & Rec star to come out with a tell-all book about the show. Welcome to Pawnee: Stories of Friendship, Waffles, and Parks and Recreation is a heartwarming look back at one of television’s most iconic comedy series, bolstered by its cast of quirky characters and the close relationship they shared behind the scenes.

Welcome to Pawnee touches upon several topics that would interest any fan; from O’Heir’s struggle with imposter syndrome, to the time Rob Lowe gave him kissing tips, to pooping himself on set and making out with Aubrey Plaza.

DECIDER sat down with O’Heir for a chat all about his new book and some of his favorite memories from the show – including the time he almost got in trouble with HR. Read it all below.

DECIDER: What inspired you to work on this book and get started with this journey?

O’HEIR: Anyone who knows me knows that I will talk about Parks & Rec until I’m blue in the face, literally non-stop, during it, as well as since. So that part was easy, but I have to give the credit to these book agents out of New York who reached out to me because I hadn’t really thought about it. They said to me, ‘The show’s coming up on its 10th anniversary of being off the air. Have you ever thought about telling your stories?’ Because whenever I’m on different podcasts or whatever, over the years, I go on and on about my time there, how wonderful it was.

I feel like this sounds a little silly when an adult man says this, but I wanted the approval of Amy [Poehler] and Mike [Schur] and Greg [Daniels]. I know I didn’t have to have that. I’m an adult man, I can write whatever I want to write. But I just felt I did. So when I reached out to them, and Greg was like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re the perfect person to write this. You were there for everything, blah, blah, blah.’ And Amy’s like, ‘Of course, tell your stories.’ Everybody, they were all on board, and everybody contributed.

I call it my love letter to the show, because that is what it is. If you read this book, there’s no dirt, because I don’t have any dirt on these people. It truly was this amazing experience that I’m forever grateful for. That being said… it wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops because other things happened.

What was your perspective on Jerry? Were there any changes that you brought to your character that deviated from what they had planned?

My reps kind of suggested maybe I shouldn’t even take this job, because at this point in my career, I was busy doing a lot of guest spots and pilots. Things have been good, but to me, it was a no-brainer, because these are the people who created background characters like Oscar and Phyllis and Meredith.

So at the beginning of it, I’m just kind of bringing things to Leslie… My fear was, if we don’t find out who Jerry is, Jerry’s not going to be here, because that’s what happens. If there’s no reason to keep a character around, they don’t keep him around. But in Season 2, there’s an episode where we’re all trying to find dirt on each other in the office, and Jerry was not into it. But at the end, he finds out that Mark Brendanawicz has two parking unpaid parking tickets. Big deal. So he says to Mark, ‘Well, I hear you have two unpaid parking tickets.’ And Mark says to him, ‘Well, I heard your adoptive mother smokes pot.’ Jerry is horrified, and he looks at him, and he goes, ‘Oh, you didn’t know your mom smoked pot?’ and Jerry says, ‘I didn’t know I was adopted.’

And that’s when they knew. That’s when it was like, bingo, this is Jerry. He’s going to be that guy. He’s going to be the guy that just not getting everything, not getting all the jokes. He’s going to be kind of the butt of a lot of the jokes.

I really enjoyed the part where you tried to moon the cast during a scene and they stopped you from doing it because they were scared of NBC’s HR.

Because we had already had a problem. Chris Pratt was doing the scene where he walks in, he’s trying to get Ann Perkins back, you know, Andy is trying to get Anne back… So Pratt did a bit where Amy opened the door and he’s just butt naked. It was hysterical. And we’re all adults. There was nothing sexual about it. It was just a funny bit. The next day, Pratt shows up, and there’s lawyers at his trailer. It caused a big old stir.

[In a later episode,] We’re doing a scene where Jerry says he was mugged. He actually wasn’t, because he fell into a creek trying to get a burrito, but because he knew they would mock him for that, he said he was mugged. And now he’s got to do a presentation where he’s talking about the fishing things in the department. And during the presentation, he bends over, his pants split and he farts, and it’s silly and funny. […] We do a whole bunch of takes and we’re all laughing. We’re just laughing, and it’s out of control. And finally, Amy’s like, ‘I’m done. You can’t make me laugh anymore. You can’t.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, that sounds like a challenge.’ So I went to the wardrobe people, and I said, in this next one, because they pre-split the pants when you bend over, they split. I said, I’m not gonna wear any underwear, so that these guys are just gonna get a big old eye full of hairy Jim O’Heir butt.

I start doing the scene, and all of a sudden I hear cut, and the director comes running in, and he pulls me aside and goes, ‘Do you have any underwear on? Because Jim, we can’t do this. We’re already dealing with lawyers for Pratt.’ And he ultimately was right, but it kind of killed me, because I think my goal was always to get them to laugh. I mean, the cast and the crew. There’s nothing better for an actor than when you break your cast and crew, because we have egos.

Now, when I look back and I’ve seen the episode and the way the pants split, I think it’s for the best, because I think they might have seen some more stuff. I don’t know exactly what would have been seen, but I think for everyone’s mental health, it might have been too much.

I was also really intrigued by the interviews included in the book. What was one thing you were shocked to learn from these interviews?

I was shocked at so many things. I had my first interview with Greg over lunch, and a number of times during the lunch, I would just go, ‘Oh my God.’ Like, I think people looked like, what is going on at that table? I never knew Amy wasn’t the first one booked on the show. I just assumed it was built around Amy. That never happened. I never knew that. Had I known I was safe from day one, they loved me from the beginning, they had no intentions of ever getting rid of me. I never knew that. I never knew Aziz was the first one cast without a script, that kind of blew me away. I never knew that Adam [Scott] had auditioned for Mark Brendanawicz. There’s so many behind the scenes stories that I never knew. And these guys were so open about everything.

It was interesting to see how candid you were about how you and Retta sometimes felt unappreciated by outside sources, could you talk a little bit about what that was like?

Retta was in the same boat as me… I mean, I can’t speak for everybody. Retta and I certainly were panicked. We are just people who have been hired. We don’t know if we’re gonna have a job the next week… And I think when you’re both kind of living the same experience and panicked about the same things, you bond quickly. And to this day, she’s my girl.

O’Heir’s new book Welcome to Pawnee: Stories of Friendship, Waffles, and Parks and Recreation will be available for purchase Nov. 19.