Amy Adams almost wasn’t cast on “The Office” for a surprising reason, Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey revealed on their podcast “Office Ladies” Wednesday. Adams appeared in the season one episode “Hot Girl.”
“In our original breakdown of this episode, we mentioned that Amy Adams, who stars as the purse girl, Katy, was [episode writer and star] Mindy Kaling’s first choice for the role. But what we didn’t share was that Amy Adams was not the first person cast in the role,” Fisher explained.
Adams was “everybody’s first choice” but “there was this 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 so they got cold feet and they cast someone else,” Fisher continued. “But when it didn’t work out, they decided to cast Amy and just lean into the fact that she and I looked similar because that wasn’t the idea behind the role at first.”
“We originally shot ‘Hot Girl’ for an entire day with a completely different actress in the role of Katy. And unfortunately, she just wasn’t quite right for the role,” Fisher also said. “They had to let her go. We replaced her with Amy.”
In the end, the role was meant to belong to Adams. “I remember when Amy came on the set, she was so seamlessly Katy. She improvises a lot, you guys. We’ll get to it. But a lot of her improvs make it in. She just knew who this woman was,” Kinsey explained.
The 2005 episode features Adams as Katy, aka “the purse girl,” a woman who attempts to sell knockoff bags at the Dunder Mifflin office – and who has to fend off advances from the male employees. Steve Carell even poked fun at the “Jenna 2.0” comparisons in the show, when he referred to Katy as “Pam 6.0.”
You can listen to the entire episode at “Office Ladies.”
