There’s no denying that Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) was the beating heart of “The Office.” She had big dreams beyond being a receptionist for a paper company and worked hard to earn the respect of her peers, all while discovering that her first fiancé wasn’t right for her. She and Jim (John Krasinski) had the “will they/won’t they” sitcom romance to end all “will they/won’t they” romances, and fans waited with bated breath to see them kiss, get together, and eventually get married.
Fischer did a great job embodying Pam, and with a prime role on one of the best sitcoms of all time, it’s safe to say she’s set for life no matter what else she does. However, it wasn’t an easy path to land the role of a lifetime. She struggled to get any acting work for the initial stretch of her career, and had to fight to get the life she wanted, which actually mirrored Pam’s journey quite a bit. Beyond that, Fischer also grappled with a contentious love life at times, as well as health issues. It hasn’t always been easy for the sitcom star, but nowadays, she has legions of “Office” fans supporting her every step of the way.
Jenna Fischer had a hard time breaking out in Hollywood
Before attaining Hollywood success, Jenna Fischer’s story probably mirrors that of a lot of actors who dream of the limelight. She always had a passion for acting going back to when she was enrolled in an acting workshop at five years old. She performed as part of a murder mystery dinner theater group in college, and after graduating, she packed her bags and traveled to Los Angeles to try to become an actor full-time.
She struggled to find any work at first, going broke after just six months of living in California and failing to secure any acting jobs. In what would be a subtle piece of foreshadowing for her most famous role yet, she got a day job as a receptionist to make ends meet. Fortunately, she managed to secure one role that gave her the confidence to keep going: A woman about to go on a date in a sex education video. In 2017, she published a piece in The New York Times about her big break, writing, “Not quite the career milestone I’d imagined during my formative years in acting school, but it was a start.”
She made $100 for the gig, which isn’t a life-changing amount of money but encouraged her to stick to her goal. She had to continue working various odd jobs to support her passion, but more substantive roles would follow, like playing a waitress on “Spin City” and a sorority girl on “Undeclared.”
She was told she wasn’t hot enough for Alias
Jenna Fischer’s struggles in Hollywood are pretty common for most actors, but no doubt her career would have taken off a lot sooner had she landed the role of Sydney Bristow (which Jennifer Garner went on to play) in “Alias,” ABC’s popular spy thriller series.
It would be interesting to see how the trajectory of Fischer’s career would have changed had she been introduced to most audiences in a more action-oriented role. Would Fischer have gone on to play Elektra in “Daredevil” and start dating Ben Affleck? Probably not, and it doesn’t matter since she didn’t get the part in the first place. Rejection is to be expected in show business, and Fischer was certainly used to it at this point in her career. But she revealed on the “Office Ladies” podcast that this rejection was particularly brutal. “The feedback that my agent got was like, Jenna blew us away,” Fischer explained. “We absolutely loved it … she just did a great job. We’re gonna pass on her because we just unfortunately don’t think she’s hot enough.”
It’s one thing to lose a job, but it’s another thing entirely to lose a job that you could be great at but don’t get for reasons beyond your control — and insulting to boot. Fischer’s confidence might not have been broken for too long, though. She later recounted that the week after auditioning for “Alias,” she lost out on a different role for being too attractive. Sometimes you just can’t win, but if that “Alias” reboot ever gets off the ground, maybe they could give Fischer a good role for old time’s sake.
Jenna Fischer almost quit acting
Before moving to Los Angeles, Jenna Fischer became engaged to her college boyfriend, who was still working toward a degree when she left. He had a very different dream than hers: he wanted to move back to his hometown of Detroit and start a business. As Fischer explained to Off Camera, they reached an agreement: Fischer had two years to make some progress as an actor. If she did, he would move to L.A. to start a business there, but if she didn’t, she would go to Detroit with him. Two years came and went with Fischer barely making any headway, but as she recalled, “I said, ‘I’m not leaving,’ and he’s like, ‘I’m not coming’ … It was very cordial.”
The pair broke up, and Fischer was filled with self-doubt. She wrote in her New York Times piece, “I felt like a failure. The thought of quitting was constant. But I was too embarrassed to go back to St. Louis.” She persevered and bounced back — first in her love life, by dating and eventually marrying James Gunn, then professionally, by directing her own feature film, “LolliLove.”
It’s a mockumentary, not unlike “The Office,” in which she and Gunn play characters trying to help the unhoused by giving them lollipops. Fischer co-wrote and directed the film in addition to starring in it, alongside some pretty big names like Jason Segel, Judy Greer, and Linda Cardellini. It took longer than she was expecting, but shortly after “LolliLove,” her whole life would change with “The Office.”
She got divorced from James Gunn
Jenna Fischer and James Gunn got married in 2000, but her association with the Gunn family goes way back. One of the other students in an acting workshop she took as a child was Sean Gunn, James’ brother, who’s an actor in his own right with notable parts in “Gilmore Girls” and the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. Sean would play an important role in Fischer’s life, as he got her into an acting showcase that eventually led to her getting a manager (and subsequently more acting work). It was also where she met James Gunn.
As stated previously, the two worked together on Fischer’s directorial effort, “LolliLove,” while Gunn started making waves as a writer and director himself in the mid-2000s. After penning 2002’s live-action “Scooby-Doo” movie and the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” he made the leap to director with 2006’s R-rated horror comedy “Slither.” Fischer played Shelby Cunningham, a police dispatcher who gets infected by an alien parasite.
The pair have never specified what happened, but in 2007, they announced their separation and soon after divorced. But Fischer and Gunn have remained amicable since; it was Fischer who suggested casting her “Office” co-star Rainn Wilson for the lead role in Gunn’s “Super.” Gunn has since said “Super” was the hardest film he ever made, but it got him into the superhero genre and led to him also making “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “The Suicide Squad,” and “Superman.”
Jenna Fischer got a lot of unfair criticism as Pam
While it’s now a beloved sitcom that a ton of people continue to binge-watch to this day, not everyone is a fan and some viewers have launched particularly scathing critiques of “The Office.” Unfortunately, a lot of disdain gets unfairly directed toward Pam and, by extension, Jenna Fischer.
When discussing the episode “Weight Loss Part 2” on the “Office Ladies” podcast, Fischer explained how a lot of fans disliked Pam for her decision to go off to art school in New York. She spent less time with Jim, and that was unforgivable for some. “I just want to say that when Pam went to art school for only three months, when she was not yet married and didn’t have children, people came down real hard on her because of Jim’s feelings,” Fischer explained. But then she points out how later in the series, Jim pursues a new job without telling Pam initially, and fans didn’t seem to care as much. “In both of these instances, I just want to say I noticed a lot of hate for Pam,” she continued. “Do I want to call it sexist? I do. I do.”
This is par for the course for many female characters on TV. For example, Skyler White (Anna Gunn, no relation to James Gunn) received a ton of undue hate on “Breaking Bad” for getting in the way of her husband’s meth-making business. It seems like a man can make a woman sad with barely any consequences, but if a woman does the same, she’s absolutely vile.
She fractured her back in a fall
Injuries are often played for laughs on “The Office,” from Michael Scott (Steve Carell) burning his foot on a George Foreman grill to Dwight pummeling Jim with copious snowballs. But they’re not so funny in real life, which is what Jenna Fischer experienced first-hand while attending an event to promote the show in May 2007.
Fischer recalled on her podcast that the she was trying to walk down a marble staircase that was a bit too steep and hurt her back badly. The bouncer thought she was just drunk, but her friend and co-star Angela Kinsey took a look at her back and knew something was wrong. When all was said and done, Fischer fractured four bones in her back, which, fortunately, healed with time. However, “The Office” episode “Fun Run” had to be changed because, as one can probably glean from the title, Fischer was in no shape to run just months after her accident.
Instead, the episode sees Pam and Jim going on a relaxing stroll while everyone else is more engaged in the fun run. Fischer later confirmed that there were no residual side effects from the mishap — but when it comes to back injuries, it could have been a lot worse.
She got typecast as Pam post-The Office
Being part of a successful TV series can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can significantly boost an actor’s profile, earning them steady paychecks and residuals far into the future through reruns. On the other hand, it can make it difficult to secure other projects when everyone in Hollywood associates you with a specific character. It happens to a lot of actors, including Jenna Fischer, who got fired from another sitcom because audiences couldn’t separate her from Pam Beesly.
After “The Office” ended in 2013, Fischer was cast in a new show that premiered in 2016 called “Man With a Plan,” built around “Friends” star Matt LeBlanc. Fischer shot the pilot and thought she had done a good job, but then it was shown to focus groups. While everyone agreed that Fischer’s performance was good, people had trouble separating her from Pam. Reportedly, they didn’t think Pam from “The Office” would be married to Joey from “Friends.” It sounds like LeBlanc also got typecast to a degree, but Fischer was the one booted from the series, with Liza Snyder assuming the role of LeBlanc’s wife.
Fischer eventually landed some different recurring roles. She was part of the main cast of “You, Me and the Apocalypse,” which got canceled after one season, and also starred on “Splitting Up Together,” which lasted slightly longer with two seasons. She hasn’t found something on the level of “The Office,” but to be fair, it’s hard to get two cultural phenomena on a resume.
She struggled like everyone else during the COVID-19 pandemic
Jenna Fischer has been incredibly forthcoming about her struggles with anxiety. Even though she’s an actor who’s in the spotlight frequently, she can often feel overwhelmed, and she provided a great analogy for living with social anxiety on a special “Monday Motivation” episode of the “Office Ladies” podcast. “The way I think about it is my anxiety is a backpack that I wear every single day,” she explained. “I take it with me every time. But some days the backpack is heavy and some days it’s light and some days it really weighs me down and makes it super hard to walk through my day.”
Naturally, COVID-19 lockdowns were especially hard on her. Speaking with Rainn Wilson on his YouTube channel, SoulPancake, shortly after lockdowns went into effect, she mentioned how being cooped up inside and not having to talk to as many people helped with her social anxiety. But it also made her more nervous overall about the state of the world.
“It’s a whole list of things you can control and things you cannot control,” Fischer said. “And so the things you can control are turning off the news, limiting my social media, my kindness and grace, my own social distancing.” Hopefully, Fischer being vocal about her own struggles has encouraged “Office” fans to realize any mental health struggles they’re going through are normal.
If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.
Fischer filmed Mean Girls with a broken shoulder
If you watched 2024’s “Mean Girls” and thought Jenna Fischer, who plays Cady’s (Angourie Rice) mother, looked a little stiff, there’s a good reason for that. It turns out that she broke her shoulder during a ski accident while between stints on the film. She explained to People, “I shot for one day on ‘Mean Girls,’ and then I didn’t have to shoot for a month. And in that month I went on a ski trip and I fell on a sidewalk and I broke my shoulder.”
Fortunately, like her previous experience dealing with an injury while filming “The Office,” the filmmakers were incredibly accommodating to her needs. She doesn’t move around a lot in most of her scenes, and there’s a subtle hint that something isn’t right in the film’s opening sequence.
When Ms. Heron tells Cady that they’re moving from Kenya to the United States, she’s holding onto a crossbody bag. It seems weird she would need to hold it since it’s secure on her shoulder, but as Fischer stated, “The reason I’m doing that is because I had to take my [shoulder] sling off. That was serving as a sling for me.” Breaking a shoulder is certainly no walk in the park, but it beats getting hit by a bus.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023
In October 2024, Jenna Fischer sat down with “Today” to reveal that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer a year earlier. She had gone to her doctor for a routine mammogram, but her doctor ordered additional tests when certain areas were hard to see. After several more exams, she learned that she had Stage 1 triple-positive breast cancer. Fischer went through a lumpectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation, and by October of the following year, she was able to say she was cancer-free.
Fischer credits maintaining her mental health during a tumultuous time with having a strong support system, including her husband Lee Kirk, her two children, and an assortment of friends. She shared her experience in the hope that more women will realize the importance of getting tested early and regularly: “If I had waited six more months, it could have been much worse,” she said. “It could have spread. It was a very aggressive form of cancer. I’m really lucky that my cancer had not spread into my lymph nodes.”
There have been ups and downs throughout Fischer’s career, but the one constant has been a supportive network of family and friends. It’s the one thing everyone could use, especially if they’re trying to make a career in entertainment.