Jenna Fischer Almost Became A Vet Tech Before Her 'Office' Audition

On this episode of The Office Deep Dive, host Brian Baumgartner (who played Kevin Malone on the popular sitcom) sits down with co-star Jenna Fischer to find out what she was doing before The Office, what her audition process was like, what’s different about Jenna from her character Pam Beesley, their biggest regret about the show, and much more. Jenna had been in L.A. for six years and was on the brink of quitting; she started looking into vet technician programs. “I couldn’t take the rejection,” she says, remembering that she would go through long audition processes, get all the way up to the screen test, “and then they would give the part to Alyson Hannigan,” she laughs. But both her agent and acting coach encouraged her to give it just one more year: “My acting coach yelled at me – ’This is what an actor’s life is, it’s a series of minor accomplishments and tons of rejection. You’re doing it!’ So I said, ‘OK, I’ll do one more year,’ and that was the year when I got the audition for The Office.”

Both Brian and Jenna have theatre backgrounds, so they loved being able to play characters that were basically never “offstage:” “If you weren’t in a scene, you were in the background,” Jenna says. “We started to joke, ‘Do we never go to the bathroom? Do we never go out to lunch?’” But it felt like “everything my acting training had prepared me for.” They also feel that putting the show in a city like Scranton made everything more relatable and universal, and still regret that they were never able to shoot an episode there. Creator Greg Daniels’ “dream was to shoot the St. Patrick’s Day Parade there,” Jenna says, and though the city couldn’t have been more accommodating, it just didn’t work out. 

They reminisce about the “ratings disaster” they were when the pilot first aired; Jenna “didn’t feel like I had job security until Steve [Carrell] won the Golden Globe.” But she credits 40-Year-Old Virgin for keeping the show alive; once it became such a hit, there was no way the NBC execs would let Steve out of his TV contract, she jokes. But not only that, it was only in season two that they started allowing Steve’s character, Michael Scott, “to be more sympathetic. They would let him break our heart a little bit,” Jenna says. “We were bringing out sprinklings of these redeeming qualities in him.” They also recall their first Emmy Awards, the only question Jenna asked when she found out she got the part, the early days of social media interaction, and much more; enjoy the entire fun conversation on this episode of The Office Deep Dive.

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