Amy Adams is a six-time Oscar nominee who was nearly passed over for a role on an NBC sitcom. On the Office Ladies podcast (via Entertainment Weekly), Jenna Fischer says that Adams was "Mindy Kaling's first choice for the role," but she wasn't actually "the first person cast in the role." When they originally shot the episode "Hot Girl," a completely different actor played Katy, the purse girl. But that person "wasn't quite right" for the part, so she was replaced by Adams.
"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," Fischer explains. "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."
Adams' appearance on The Office came after starring in Catch Me If You Can and Junebug (among other appearances), but before her breakout roles in Enchanted and Doubt. After debuting in the first season in "Hot Girl," she returned as Jim's (John Krasinski) girlfriend in the second season, where she served as a foil for Pam. But the similarities between the two actors "was not part of the conception of Katy the purse girl," as Fischer explains. In fact, Michael Scott's (Steve Carrell) line that "She's like Pam 6.0" was inspired by the writers' initial hesitance to cast Adams.
Obviously, it turned out to be a good move to cast Adams; Carrell even described her as "one of the best right off the bat" in terms of guest stars. "I remember when she came in to do her first episode because it's sort of a tricky thing, that look to the camera and how hard you play it or how subtly you play it, but she had it down," Carrell said on The Office Deep Dive with Brain Baumgartner (via CBR). "I remember that first episode, she—because she was aware of the camera—but she played it in a very different way. Like, cause she was an outsider, she didn't work there. Like, 'What are you doing here? Did you just record what I just said?'"
The Office Ladies would agree. “I remember when Amy came on the set, she was so seamlessly Katy," Fischer recalled. "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."
