The Office’s Jenna Fischer is explaining her decision to take a step back from television.
After the hit NBC sitcom wrapped in 2013, Fischer, 52, starred in ABC’s short-lived Splitting Up Together from 2018 to 2019 but realized that the demands of a starring television role were no longer compatible with her life.
The actress revealed during an interview on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast on Tuesday, August 18, that while she “really loved that cast so much … the hours were so intense, it was like 65, 70 hours a week.”
“It was really, really hard, and my kids were very small,” said Fischer, who shares son Weston Lee, 14, and daughter Harper Marie, 12, with husband Lee Kirk.
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“I just decided after that that being the lead of the television show or even a regular on a television show was not going to be a fit for me anymore,” she continued. “So when that show was canceled, that’s when I pivoted into podcasting.”
Fischer, who hosts the Office rewatch podcast “Office Ladies” with former costar Angela Kinsey, said that moving into the podcasting space “afforded me a lifestyle with both a steady income and also I was now at every school drop-off, every school pickup, every teacher conference, every concert.”
“I didn’t have to beg someone to go to the Halloween parade,” she shared. “It was like I was the agent of my own time, the architect of my own time, so to speak, and that was great.”
The consequence of her new role as podcaster extraordinaire was that her children weren’t too familiar with her iconic role as Pam Beesly in The Office, which aired from 2005 to 2013.
“My kids, because they were so little when that change happened, they thought of me as a podcaster,” Fischer explained. “Like, if anybody asked them, ‘What does your mom do?’ they [said], ‘Oh, she’s a podcaster. She has a podcast.’ They didn’t understand what my podcast was about.”
Fischer also opened up about the “emotional” decision to end The Office after season 9, noting that former lead Steve Carell had already left after season 7 aired in 2011.
“Both Ed [Helms] and Rainn [Wilson] had some other things that they were doing, so they couldn’t even sign up for a whole season, so John [Krasinski] and I were kind of the last of the original main cast who had signed up for a full season 9,” she said. “It started feeling like, ‘Oh, no, are we going to start one by one losing people?’ Mindy [Kaling] had moved on. B.J. [Novak] had moved on.”
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Fischer continued, “It was actually John Krasinski who said, ‘Gosh, it would be great if we could call our out, if we could know this is our last season and we could write toward that, and we can end it all together.’ I think NBC would have liked to have had us stay another year, but we sort of said, ‘Let’s all go out together.’”
The actress said that the cast also “felt like we were finished” and were “curious about doing other things,” though she admitted the job security of her role on the sitcom was difficult to leave behind.
