Jenna Fischer
Regina Marie Kirk, known professionally as Jenna Fischer, is an American actress. She is best known for her role as Pam Beesly on the NBC sitcom The Office, for which she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2007; she was also a producer for the series' ninth and final season.
Fischer also had starring roles on the Sky 1 and NBC comedy-drama series You, Me and the Apocalypse and the ABC sitcom Splitting Up Together. She had starring roles in the comedy films Blades of Glory, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, The Promotion, Hall Pass, and The Giant Mechanical Man, a film directed by her husband, Lee Kirk. She also had starring roles in the drama films Solitary Man, Brad's Status, and The 15:17 to Paris. Fischer had supporting roles in Employee of the Month, Slither, and Mean Girls.
Fischer is the co-host of the podcast Office Ladies alongside her The Office co-star, Angela Kinsey. Fischer's first book, The Actor's Life: A Survival Guide, was published in November 2017.
Early life
Fischer was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Anne, is a history teacher; her father, James E. Fischer, is an engineer. She has one younger sister, Emily, a third grade teacher. She first performed at the age of six, when she participated in an acting workshop taught by her mother at Henry School in St. Louis, a workshop also attended by actor Sean Gunn, with whom she grew up.She later attended Pierremont Elementary School in Manchester, Missouri, and Nerinx Hall High School, a private all-girls Catholic school in Webster Groves, Missouri. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in theater, as well as a minor in journalism, from Truman State University, where she originally enrolled as a pre-law history major.
Career
Early work and ''LolliLove''
While attending college at Truman State University, Fischer performed with a touring Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre group. Upon her move to Los Angeles in 1998, she began performing Commedia dell'arte with the Zoo District Theatre Company, and was noticed by a talent agent during her appearance in their musical adaptation of the 1922 film Nosferatu. This led to her signing a contract with the agent.Fischer struggled to break into film and television. Her first paying film role was in a sex education video for psychiatric patients upon their release from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Three years elapsed from the time she arrived in California until she landed her first televised speaking role, playing a waitress on the TV sitcom Spin City in 2001. She subsequently had bit parts in small independent films, including Employee of the Month, Lucky 13 and The Specials, then progressed to guest roles on television series including Cold Case, Miss Match, Off Centre, Six Feet Under, Strong Medicine, That '70s Show, Undeclared, and What I Like About You.
Unsatisfied with her career's progress, Fischer took matters into her own hands, writing, directing and starring in her own mockumentary, LolliLove, co-starring her then-husband James Gunn, and friends Linda Cardellini, Judy Greer, Lloyd Kaufman and Jason Segel. She began participating in The Artist's Way, a self-led creativity seminar in book form. "From doing that book I got this idea... When we started it, it wasn't even supposed to be a real movie. It was just going to be an improv project for James and I to amuse ourselves with."
LolliLove premiered in November 2004 at the St. Louis International Film Festival, and was also shown at the TromaDance Film Festival. For her role, Fischer received the Screen Actors Guild Emerging Actor Award. Despite the film's contribution to her career, she admitted to a St. Louis arts and entertainment magazine that the experience dissuaded her from future directing: "The directing was exhausting and the writing was painful. It was very difficult to direct and star in a movie. We also had a very small crew so I did a lot of things a normal director doesn't have to do, like make the props and serve lunch. I was simultaneously getting into character, going over my lines, set dressing the next shot, coaching an actor, and brainstorming with my D.P. I'm good at multitasking, but that was too much for me. I couldn't enjoy any one part the way I would have liked. I think I'll stick to acting. That part was fantastic."
''The Office'' and career expansion
In 2005, after a succession of mostly improvised auditions similar to her LolliLove experience, Fischer landed the role of Pam Beesly on what became the NBC hit The Office, based on the original BBC series. Before her first audition, casting director Allison Jones told her: "Dare to bore me." While looking for acting work, Fischer herself spent several years as a receptionist and administrative assistant in Los Angeles offices, much like her television counterpart, and thus felt she was well suited to the role. "I'm so attached to Pam's journey", she told NPR in 2009. "I just love playing this character so, so much." Soon after The Office premiered, Fischer was focused on the series' success. In an April 2005 interview with her alma mater's student newspaper, she said: "Honestly, it would be great to get to play Pam for a long, long time... I don't have real big aspirations to be a movie star. I would love to be on a long-running hit TV show. You end up playing a defining role." For the third season of The Office, Fischer was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2007.In January 2008, the cast of The Office won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series at the 14th Screen Actors Guild Awards. Fischer, who was voted to deliver the acceptance speech on their behalf, said: "We really love working together. We love each other, we love working together, and being together. And as an ensemble, a lot of people in this group struggled for a long time as non-working actors—like 8, 12, 15, 20 years. So, we're always grateful, we don't take it for granted. Thank you so much."
Fischer appeared on Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown in 2006, participating in the series' eighth tournament, shot in New Orleans, Louisiana, and playing for Catholic Charities USA's Tsunami Relief. In 2007, she starred in the music video for Willie Wisely's single "Through Any Window", directed by longtime friend John Cabrera; she knew Wisely from work he had done on soundtracks for LolliLove and Tromeo and Juliet, one of her husband's films. In December of that year, during the Writers Guild of America strike, Fischer appeared at Sacred Fools Theater Company in episode 25 of Darque Magick, a serialized play written and directed by Jenelle Riley. Also in 2006, she co-starred in Gunn's film Slither; Fischer said that Gunn gave her the role of Shelby as a "birthday present". The following year, she filmed supporting roles in three feature films: The Brothers Solomon, with Will Arnett and Will Forte; Blades of Glory, with Arnett, Will Ferrell, Jon Heder and Amy Poehler; and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, with John C. Reilly, with whom she co-starred again in 2008's The Promotion, also starring Seann William Scott.
In 2009, Fischer completed shooting on the films Solitary Man and A Little Help; the latter opened in the summer of 2010 at the Seattle International Film Festival. Also that summer, she filmed on the Farrelly brothers comedy Hall Pass, which was released in February 2011. She was named a producer of the mid-August through October 2010 run of the critically acclaimed play Sad Happy Sucker, written by her husband Lee Kirk and directed by friend Sean Gunn; it previously ran as a theatre workshop in February and March 2007. In July 2009, Fischer played left field for the National League team in the Taco Bell All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game as part of the MLB All-Star Week festivities at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, where she grew up. She was named an official spokeswoman for Proactiv Skincare Solutions that year and was announced as the voice behind the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board Grilled Cheese Academy website in 2010. In March 2010, she returned to co-chair an annual fundraiser auction for her alma mater Nerinx Hall High School, where she auctioned off a set visit to The Office and multiple autographed props from the series.
After finishing The Office, Fischer starred in the off-Broadway play Reasons to Be Happy, written and directed by Neil LaBute, which ran from May to June 2013. She starred in the world premiere of Steve Martin's comedy Meteor Shower at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, from July 30 to September 18, 2016. She also worked with actors Greg Germann, Alexandra Henrikson, and Josh Stamberg.
In April 2018, Fischer was interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! wearing only a towel and jeans when the zipper on her dress broke shortly before she went on. She came out on stage carrying the dress she'd intended to wear and commented to the audience: "I'm mentally freaking out I'm on a talk show in a towel, but I'm physically very comfortable."
In September 2019, Fischer announced that she and Angela Kinsey would co-host a weekly The Office rewatch podcast called Office Ladies, which premiered in October. Its first episode was released October 16, 2019. Their guests have included actors John Krasinski, Oscar Nunez, and Rainn Wilson, and producers/directors Greg Daniels, Paul Feig, and Ken Kwapis. Fischer and Kinsey continued to produce the podcast during the COVID-19 pandemic by recording it in closet studios in their homes. In January 2021, Office Ladies won the 2021 iHeartRadio Podcast of the Year Award.
In February 2021, Fischer and Kinsey announced that they wrote a book, titled "The Office BFFs: Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There", a collection of stories and photos about their friendship and time on The Office. The book was published on May 17, 2022, by HarperCollins Publishers LL as a hardcover, e-book, and audiobook.
In February 2023, Fischer was announced to play Mrs. Heron in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Mean Girls, based on the 2004 film of the same name.
In October 2024, Fischer and Kinsey announced the next phase of Office Ladies, which will begin when they complete their rewatch. Beginning on November 6, Office Ladies will move to a twice-a-week format with the Wednesday episodes being called "Office Ladies 6.0". Future episodes, Fischer and Kinsey said, will feature new interviews, more stories from the set, their patented "deep dives" into random topics and in-depth character studies. In addition to "Office Ladies 6.0", they will rerun the rewatch over from the beginning, along with new material, in a podcast that will begin on November 11 called "Second Drink". According to Audacy, Office Ladies has more than 400 million downloads, and in Edison Research's stats for the Top 50 podcasts in the United States for the second quarter of 2024, the podcast appeared at No. 34, and more than a million listeners follow the podcast on Spotify.