[IMG:L] The Office’s long-suffering secretary Pam Beesly may have a hard time finding ways to express herself in her dreary cubicle-filled world, but the actress who plays her clearly does not, as Hollywood.com discovered when Jenna Fischer sounded off on getting groped by Will Ferrell and Frenching Jon Heder in Blades of Glory, the “Will Pam and Jim or won’t Pam and Jim?” conundrum, her cat’s get-rich-quick schemes and the coolest “getting fired from a boring office job” story we’ve heard in a long time.
Hollywood.com: So how many takes did Will need to nail that scene where he feels you up?
Jenna Fischer: It’s not takes it’s number of hours. That was a 12-hour day. That was 12 hours of Will Ferrell massaging my boobs. Around hour seven you’re like, “Man, my boobs don’t need any more action for like a few months”. My husband? I was like slapping his hands away for two weeks, like “They’re done. No more.” That was a lot. I mean that’s like a full two minutes on screen of him touching my boobs, so there was like a whole day of that.
HW: How does the first take get started?
JF: On the first take he said “Okay Jenna, you’re married and I’m married and NO funny business. Anything that makes you uncomfortable, I want you to tell me. I just want you to feel comfortable.” I said “Okay, let’s just go for it and make it funny.” He’s like “Yeah.” So we just went for it, and as soon as they yelled cut his hands came off like he was touching a hot iron. He was like so respectful. But then around hour eight it’s so normal that they yelled cut and we are discussing the scene with the director and I said “Yeah, dude, your hands are still on my boobs.” And that was cool, but when we went to lunch and he was still squeezing my boobs and then that night at my car…I haven’t been in a lot of films, but he said that was normal. But I’m still not sure. I’m not positive that that was right. He said that was okay, and he suggested to promote the film he should play with my boobs. I think that’s cool, right? That’s how it’s done? That’s what he said.
HW: Your makeout session with Jon Heder is destined to be nominated for Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards.
JF: In the script it just said they kissed. It didn’t say they kissed the grossest kiss you’ve ever seen. We sort of felt our two characters that was their first kiss in life, and they were older and not experienced, and we thought “What must that look like?” And in rehearsal Jon said “Okay, I’m going to keep my mouth closed, but I’m going to keep kissing you with a closed mouth and I want you to tongue-kiss me and tongue-kiss my face.” I was like “All right.” That’s what we did. I was so excited because I really didn’t know Jon very well and he was so game. He was just so up for just really being crazy. That was like five hours of Frenching his lips.
HW: And your flirty phone conversation with Jon had a little improv assist from Will Arnett?
JF: Oh, that phone call was great. There’s that part in the phone call where Will Arnett hands me a pad of paper and something’s written on it. Every time he handed me that pad of paper it was different. I actually think it was his own way to say “F*ck you,” to see if I could get through the take having to read what he had written on the paper. It was sometimes horribly obscene. Completely unusable. Completely X-rated. I knew but I had to read whatever was on that pad of paper. It was aggressively harsh, because he knew that he had me in that spot. I wish I had all those unusable pieces of paper that I could just staple together and read one right after the other because they were all a variation on my breasts. “Wax my jugs” was what ended up in the movie, but like they were all various things I had to go do to my boobs before the date.
HW: We’re guessing a few seasons of working with Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson made it a little bit easier to keep a straight face with the Blades team.
JF: The bar was set pretty high for me in terms of quality of people and quality of comedy. To go on The Office and be working with really some of the funniest people in the business– writers and otherwise. It was like…I couldn’t believe on my break I got to work with basically the other most funny people in Hollywood. It was pretty insane. Yeah, I spend a lot of my life laughing. It’s pretty cool. When I met my husband, I fell in love with him for his sense of humor and he said the only down side to my success is it’s harder to make me laugh at home. He said “I really have to step it up because you’re with comedy geniuses all day.” And he’s like “You used to think I was so funny. You thought I was the funniest man alive.” He really has to step it up now, because I spend my days with Steve Carell and Will Ferrell. But my husband and I hung out last night and we laughed for a half-hour. We had this one bit that we did for like a half-hour. It was incredibly funny to me. He can still hold his own. He shouldn’t worry.
[IMG:R]HW: C’mon, give up the bit.
JF: Oh, man, I don’t know. I don’t know if you want to say what your bits are. We have this running bit about how our cat is hounding us for a million dollars. Our cat has all these get-rich-quick schemes. He wants to sell a line of T-shirts and we’re always incredibly frustrated and put upon by our cat’s monetary demands and his get-rich-quick schemes. All our cat cares about is a million dollars – he’s constantly asking for a million dollars to buy sushi. And one day if we’re ever, like, stupid rich I would love to play a practical joke, where my husband’s home and I have this sushi truck back up to the house and deliver a million dollars worth of sushi to our cat. Like “Oh, hi, this is for Andy Fischer Gunn. A truck load of Maguru.” “I don’t know – I think my husband has to sign for that.” Crates and crates full of tuna.
HW: Can you say anything about The Office’s season finale? Is it a big cliffhanger?
JF: It is…We just filmed our 50th episode directed by Harold Ramis and that’s the episode before the finale, and there’s a lot that happens in that episode that leads into a big finale. There’s a huge Michael/Jan storyline that is just really awesome in the finale, but there’s a lot of Jim/Pam stuff as well. But I can say that one thing: their arc for Pam this season is that she’s trying to find her own voice and trying to get what she wants, and that is going to continue. Pam really is gong to come out of her shell in the last few remaining episodes of the season, and that was really exciting.
HW: What was working with Harold Ramis like?
JF: Harold Ramis is hilarious. We just pick his brain constantly. We ask him all about starting out in comedy and what was that like and all the people he’s worked with, and that guy is amazing. I can’t believe that I just spend all last week hanging out with Harold Ramis. It’s so weird.
HW: TV has a long history of long running shows with “Will they or won’t they” romantic plots. How long do you see this carrying on with Pam and Jim on The Office before it needs to be resolved?
JF: You know, there’re a lot of things they said we couldn’t do with The Office. Early on people said things like “Another British import — they all failed. Your show’s not going to make it,” or whatever it was. We’ve had all these hurdles and I feel like we’re going to break the mold on the relationship curse, I really do. I feel like the most important thing is that we just stay true to the characters. I don’t think they’re going to force us to be apart any longer than is natural and they’re not going to force us to be together any longer than is natural. I think that if you really love these people – being that it’s a character-driven comedy not a gag driven-comedy – as long as you’re really invested in the people we will overcome all of those sort of pitfalls and burdens of other shows. I have complete faith in our writers and in the show. And I don’t know if Jim and Pam are ultimately meant to be together – and I say this to producers all the time. Sometimes that person helps you become the person that you’re supposed to be to meet the person you’re supposed to marry. Maybe that’s our story and if that’s our story that’s still a beautiful story to tell. So if we’re still on the air in 10 years and you’re just not feeling Jim and Pam anymore, that’s alright. I think we’re open to letting it be that way. We’re not committed to end of this series as a wedding between Jim and Pam and a baby, you know. It’s more of like a rea-life story.
HW: Did you watch the original British version of the show before you got involved?
JF: Obsessively. And not even knowing they were making an American version. I watched the British version and I actually stood up in my living room and said “Why don’t we make stuff like this in America?! This is brilliant TV! This is why I became an actor! This is exactly what I want to do! I’m never, ever going to get to be able to do anything this awesome!” Then two weeks later they called me and said “We’d like you to audition for the American version of a show called The Office. I almost peed my pants. I was terrified, because I thought I didn’t want to be in the schlocky sitcom version of The Office. And actually my first audition for the show in some ways they were auditioning for me because I would not have participated in that sitcom version of the show. I just went in in character and they interviewed me for 10 minutes, completely improv. I decided that Pam Beasley is not a good interview. She’s not going to help a documentarian make a great documentary. That was my take on the character and when they liked that idea, I was like “Oh, this is a fun show to work on.” They liked my twist, and I liked that they liked my twist.
HW: Have you ever had the typical boring office job?
JF: Oh, more than I can say. That was how I earned my money as a struggling actor. I worked in various investment firms, medical facilities. I transcribed press tours. I transcribed the Television Critics Association Press Tour. That was my first job in LA. I sat in a hot little hotel room typing away, listening to actors be witty. It was awful…It’s smelly in there. They put like 12 people in a room with computers and you just sit and type away all day. It was brutal. I pretend to be sick one day when they had this Saturday Night Live party afterwards, with all these SNL folks. I feigned sickness starting in the morning and I even sneaked into the bathroom and put a little yellow makeup under my eyes to make them look sunken in. I started coughing. I had this whole plan so I could leave early. Then I went to my car, I changed into other clothes, put on makeup, I walked over to one of the limo drivers who had driven one of the stars to the show. I said “Dude, could you just like drop me off at the front door.” He dropped me off at the front door; I walked down the red carpet right into the SNL party and ran right into my boss. He fired me on the spot.
