Jenna Fischer is opening up about why she walked away from acting after starring as Pam Beesly on The Office for nine seasons.
After wrapping up the beloved NBC sitcom in 2013, Fischer went on to star in the ABC comedy Splitting Up Together in 2018, but quickly realized a harsh truth: she did not want to juggle being both a full-time actor and a full-time mother to her two children.
Fischer, 52, said during her recent appearance on the Dinner’s On Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson podcast: “The hours were so intense.”
“It was like 65, 70 hours a week,” she recalled. “You know, it was, like, really, really hard, and my kids were very small.”
Fischer added that that she “really loved” her Splitting Up Together castmates, including Oliver Hudson, Diane Farr, Bobby Lee, Lindsay Price, Van Crosby, Sander Thomas and Lindsay Price. However, the series was canceled in May 2019 after two seasons.
The Emmy-nominated actor, who has a son, 14, and daughter, 12, with husband Lee Kirk, said that the series made her reconsider what she wanted from her career.
“I just decided after that that being, like, the lead of a television show or even a regular on a television show was not going to be a fit for me anymore,” she said.
After Splitting Up Together, Fischer formed a podcast about The Office with her former co-star Angela Kinsey, who played Angela Martin on the iconic comedy. The show features Fischer and Kinsey revisiting episodes of the hit sitcom and speaking about their memories from filming the show.
She told Ferguson that for her family’s sake, she preferred her podcasting career so that she still brings in “a steady income” while having more control over her time.
“I was now at every school drop-off, every school pickup, every teacher conference, every concert,” she said. “I didn’t have to beg someone to go to the Halloween parade.”
Fischer, who is now cancer-free after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, described the career shift as becoming “the agent of my own time, the architect of my own time, so to speak.”
Despite the actor moving away from starring in a lead television role, she has gone on to take on supporting roles in other projects.
She played Cady Heron’s mom in the 2024 movie musical Mean Girls, and appears in her husband’s coming-of-age comedy Nimrods, which is playing now in U.S. theaters.
