Amy Adams almost lost the role on The Office, if you can believe it

Amy Adams is a six-time Oscar nominee who was almost passed over for a role on an NBC sitcom. On Office ladies podcast (via Weekly entertainment), Jenna Fischer says that Adams was “Mindy Kaling’s first choice for the role,” but she was not actually “the first person with the role.” When they originally shot the episode “Hot Girl”, a completely different actor played Katy, the purse girl. But that person “wasn’t quite right” for the role, so she was replaced by Adams.

“There was a concern that Amy and I looked too similar. And I guess one of the writers even said, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t cast her. She’s like Jenna 2.0.’ And then they got cold feet and they cast someone else,” explains Fischer. “But when it didn’t work out, they decided to cast Amy and just lean into the fact that she and I looked alike, because that wasn’t the idea behind the role at the beginning.”

Adams’ performance on The office came after participating Catch me if you can and June bug (among other appearances), but before her breakout roles in Enchanted and Doubt. After debuting in the first season in “Hot Girl,” she returned as Jim’s (John Krasinski) girlfriend in the second season, serving as a foil to Pam. But the similarities between the two actors “were not part of the idea of ​​Katy the purse girl,” as Fischer explains. In fact, Michael Scott’s (Steve Carrell) line that “She’s like Pam 6.0” was inspired by the writers’ initial hesitation to cast Adams.

Obviously, casting Adams turned out to be a good move; Carrell even described her as “one of the best right out there” in terms of guest stars. ““I remember when she came in to do her first episode because it’s a tricky thing, looking at the camera and how hard you play it or how subtly you play it, but she had it down,” Carrell said on Office Deep Dive with Brain Baumgartner (via CBR). “I remember the first episode she—because she was paying attention to the camera—but she played it in a very different way. Because she was an outsider, she wasn’t working there. Like, ‘What are you doing here? You just shot what I just said?’”

The office ladies would agree. “I remember when Amy came on set, she was so seamlessly Katy,” Fischer recalled. “She improvises a lot, you guys. We’ll get to that. But a lot of her improvisations do. She just knew who this woman was.”