When Paul Faust walks into Starbucks in Pleasantville, he’s a regular celebrity.

He orders a grande coffee and gets a “Where’ve ya been?” in reply from the barrista, who noted his absence while he spent a week on the beaches and turquoise waters of St. Thomas.

“They’re my biggest fans in the Starbucks,” the 38-year-old Faust says. “It’s great.”

But even if his business wasn’t headquartered upstairs in the professional building opposite the village’s Metro North station, and even if he didn’t, by his own admission, “live” in the coffeehouse, Faust could expect a modicum of celebrity treatment.

The New Rochelle-born father of two, who grew up in Larchmont and lives now in Somers, gained renown in the Office fandom and a permanent place in the lore of Scranton Business Park following a brief stint as himself in a recent episode of NBC’s hit workplace comedy.

He chatted Friday afternoon about what was literally the role of his life, playing one of the heads of the business park’s five families to whom Kevin and Andy (Brian Baumgartner and Ed Helms) appeal for help with their parking woes.

“Originally I wasn’t supposed to play the part,” he said. “They were using Paul Faust who owns Disaster Kits Ltd. That was the part. They just didn’t like the actors reading for it. So someone said, Why don’t we just let him read for it?”

The thing is Faust really does own 1800prepare, LLC, a disaster supply kit retailer that is an off-shoot of his main business licensing vanity phone numbers.

He immediately secured the Web addresses disasterkitslimited.com and coolguypaul.com. A photo of him used in the episode shows him on a motorcycle that actually belonged to the photographer and was meant to convey coolness.

So how does a regular Westchester guy, whose last performance came on stage at his alma mater Mamaroneck High School, land a speaking role on a network sitcom? Let’s just say it’s sometimes who you know.

Faust’s wife, the former Jaclyn Lieberstein, is a cousin of Office writer/actor/producer Paul Lieberstein, who plays sullen HR rep Toby Flenderson. It’s a regular family tree on the Office set: Executive Producer Greg Daniels and actress Angela Kinsey (who plays uptight accountant Angela Martin) are also Lieberstein cousins by marriage.

That’s why Faust was on set for the shooting of the episode “Phyllis’s Wedding” early last year and why, during another business trip to LA last August, he spent a day on set watching audition footage for the role of the pizza delivery kid kidnapped by Office boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) in the episode “Launch Party.”

It was then that Daniels introduced Faust around the writers room and told him to tell them them all about his business. Faust is an enthusiastic guy, not the type to be at a loss for words in that kind of situation. Still, he didn’t think much about the encounter at the time. Apparently, though, he made quite an impact.

As Office writer/actor BJ Novak, who plays Michael’s boss Ryan, explained in a recent Q&A with fan site OfficeTally.com, Faust launched into a captivating monologue about his business.

“Without any exaggeration, it was the most confident and persuasive sales pitch any of us had ever seen,” Novak said. “So, since then, we thought someone like that would be a good basis for a character.”

Novak explained that when they conceived the idea of the Five Families, they thought it would be funny if four of them took it very seriously while there would be one, younger than the rest, who couldn’t be bothered.

And that’s why, about four weeks ago, Faust received an e-mail at work from Lieberstein asking if he felt like acting. They were shooting a small scene the next morning that they thought he might be right for.

Within three hours, he had a script in hand and video of himself reading his lines—recorded hastily with help from the staff at Pleasantville’s Photo Works. Twenty minutes after he e-mailed the video back, he got a reply offering him the part.

He called home and asked his wife to pack him a bag because he was booked on an 8:45 p.m. flight to Los Angeles. Naturally, weather held up his takeoff until 10:30, and the airline lost his bag. Still, he was in his hotel room by 2 a.m., completely wired. With less than two hours of sleep, he was on set by 7.

The day before, he had e-mailed Lieberstein to say he hoped they had a stand-in ready in case he stunk it up. Lieberstein assured him the show prefers non-actors for parts like this because they’re better suited to its mock documentary style.

Faust says he was mostly nervous about letting everybody down. And the presence of family and friends like Baumgartner, whom he had gotten to know well in the past year, only added to the pressure.

“You’ve got a hundred some-odd, 200 people on set between actors, writers, producers, electricians, food, security,” he said. “You know, you don’t do a good job you’re wasting everybody’s day.”

His tiny taste of the TV star’s life included his own trailer, which said “Cool Guy Paul” on the side, and the requisite stops at hair and makeup and at wardrobe. He even got to dine on craft services.

On set, everybody in the scene read through the script for a few minutes and then they just started shooting. He lost track how many takes they shot, guessing somewhere between 15 and 30. Each time they’d tweak small details in line delivery, lighting or camera angles. When they dropped jargon on him he had to remind them he was not a veteran actor and needed things spelled out.

Helms and Baumgartner and the rest didn’t make things any easier.

“The entire time they’re trying to make you laugh,” Faust said. “First of all, they are geniuses. Second of all, there is not one scene that we shot where they say the same lines. They’re improv’ing every scene.”

Even though nearly all the lines are scripted, they came out differently every time, he said. That includes when Kevin complains that walking makes some people sweat a lot or when Andy introduced himself as “Andrew Bernard is the name of me,”

“So I don’t know what’s going to come out of their mouths,” he said. “But with their facial expressions and them looking at you, I couldn’t look at them anymore. I was looking at Kevin’s neck because if I looked at his face I was going to lose it.”

Just when he thought the shooting was done, rewrites came down. He’d spent most of the last 20 hours preparing the five lines he was first given. Now he had eight new lines and just 10 minutes to learn them.

They got the scene in about 10 more takes and as he was leaving he was pulled aside to shoot a Talking Head interview in which he talked about his business and his “Cool Guy” nickname with the documentary crew. That scene was cut from the final episode, but he hopes it makes the Season 4 DVD extras.

After that he hung around for another hour and went back to his hotel. Instead of hanging around to fly back the next day, he caught the next flight that night. He was there about 22 hours in all.

“It was pretty crazy,” he said. “It was like, did that really happen?”

Faust says he and his business partner proposed to NBC a line of Disaster Kits Ltd. merchandise, much like the Vance Refrigeration items now on sale, at the NBC Universal store. The fact that there’s a real Paul Faust and a real Disaster Kits Ltd. makes it a unique opportunity, he figures.

He’s also hatching a cross-promotional plan in which he would use his newfound fame to raise money for a rescue dog—which he’d name Dunder after The Office’s Dunder Mifflin Paper.

He is enjoying, but admits he is somewhat perplexed by, the effects of his sudden fame.

A friend brought his son by to meet him. A fan in an online Office chat room called Faust his hero. He even stumbled across an online poll gauging his hotness.

“I was a volunteer firefighter in Chappaqua for seven years,” he said. “Not a lot of people wanted to meet me when I was a volunteer fireman, doing something like that, going into burning buildings or to car accidents to help people out. But you have a couple of lines on a sit-com and all the sudden people want to meet you.”

A fan started an online campaign at the social networking site Facebook to bring Faust back on the show. Faust is game and figures it’s a real possibility given that his character is now part of the show’s back-story.

On April 17, the night the episode aired, Faust and his wife invited about two dozen friends over. He didn’t know until then if any or all of his lines made the cut. The best part was his son’s excitement over seeing him on TV.

“Now I don’t hear the end of it, from family, at dinner,” he says of his on-screen moniker. “It’s better than Fat Guy Paul or Loser Guy Paul. It’s all anyone says now. What does the Cool Guy say?”