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Though Jenna Fischer has played a number of roles over the course of her career, Pam Beesly is undoubtedly her most iconic. For nine seasons, Fischer portrayed Pam on the hit NBC series, The Office. Naturally, spending so much time as the receptionist turned office manager made Fischer feel extremely protective over Pam. In fact, Fischer deliberately held back from doing certain things to keep her character authentic.

The Office star Jenna Fischer as Pam
‘The Office’ star Jenna Fischer | Byron Cohen/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank

Jenna Fischer explains how she kept her character, Pam Beesly, authentic

Fischer was relatively unknown when she booked her role on The Office. However, once the show started to gain traction, she became a household name. As a celebrity in the entertainment industry, there’s often pressure to look a specific way. However, Fischer deliberately held back from altering her physical appearance in big and small ways so that Pam still felt like a normal woman from Scranton.

“To keep Pam authentic, I’ve held back from doing some things,” Fischer told Playboy Magazine via the Boston Herald. “I haven’t had my teeth whitened. I haven’t gotten porcelain veneers. And you’ll notice other things if you look carefully. I don’t get Mystic Tan treatments, for example, or any of that stuff. I need to keep it real so Pam can always look like a believable girl, not suddenly all plasticky like a movie star.”

‘The Office’ star was advised not to get too glam for her audition

Because The Office is a mockumentary that follows “real people,” Fischer’s move not to make herself too glam was the right one. Interestingly enough, her decision not to play up her beauty was advice that she received when she was auditioning for the role of Pam. In an interview with NPR, the Office Ladies co-host shared the advice she received from casting director, Allison Jones, ahead of her audition.

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“She gave me some coaching on the phone,” Fischer remembered. “What she said was, don’t come in looking pretty; which, you know, a lot of times, when you go in on an audition, they want you to look inappropriately sexy or hot for the role. And I used to get called in to play things like, oh, like, a third-grade schoolteacher but look really hot. And so, in this instance, the – when I went in for The Office, the casting director said to me, she said, please look normal. Don’t make yourself all pretty.”

Why the decision to downplay Pam’s beauty works for ‘The Office’

It’s certainly interesting that there was so much emphasis placed on downplaying Pam’s beauty. This is especially true since the other characters of The Office often comment on how hot the character is. However, it actually makes a lot of sense. What’s humorous to the audience is that Pam is never trying to gain attention for her looks; she’s merely trying to do her job. When she does choose to rely on her looks, we realize that it’s a means to an end and a way for her to get something she wants. Thus, protecting Pam’s authenticity was the right choice for Fischer to make.

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