It’s no secret that big roles with thousands of fans can come back to haunt you. Across the history of pop culture fame are the ghosts of those typecast for their work.
Actress Jenna Fischer, most famous for her role as Pam Beesly in ‘The Office’, has suffered a similar fate.
In the latest episode of her ‘Office Ladies’ podcast, the 47-year-old actress said that she was fired after shooting a pilot for ‘Man with a Plan’ because test audiences closely associated herself and Matt LeBlanc with their respective characters on ‘The Office’ and ‘Friends’ and didn’t “believe Pam would marry Joey.”
“They said — this is a literal quote, they said, ‘I don’t believe Pam would marry Joey. The chemistry doesn’t work between these two,’” Fischer told her Office Ladies co-host Angela Kinsey. “That was the feedback they got.”
“They could only see you as Pam and Joey?” asked Kinsey, who played Angela Martin on ‘The Office’.
“Yeah,” Fischer replied. “So it wasn’t working for them that we got married and had a family.”
According to Fischer, she learned that the show was moving on without her just days before she was was set to go to New York for upfronts.
“The first thing I said was, ‘Is [‘Man with a Plan’] not getting picked up?’” Fischer remembered asking after receiving a call from her reps. “And they said, ‘It’s worse than that, hun.’ And I was like, ‘What’s worse than that?’ They said, ‘It’s getting picked up, but without you.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, I guess I’ll unpack my suitcase.’”
‘Man with a Plan’ ran for four seasons from 2016 to 2020 on CBS, with Liza Snyder starring opposite of LeBlanc.
