Jenna Fischer Opens Up About Stepping Away from Acting After ‘The Office’: It ‘Wasn’t a Fit for Me Anymore’

Jenna Fischer opened up about her decision to step away from Hollywood in the years after ‘The Office,’ as she shared the moment she realized that “being the lead of a television show or even a regular on a television show was not gonna be a fit for me anymore.”

Dinner's On Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson/Youtube; Chris Haston/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank

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Jenna Fischer opened up to Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his podcast, Dinner’s on Me, about her decision to step away from Hollywood in the years after The Office

A mom of two — she shares son Weston, 14, and daughter Harper, 12, with her husband Lee Kirk — Fischer said long hours on set were “really, really hard” to maintain

She shared the moment she realized that “being the lead of a television show or even a regular on a television show was not gonna be a fit for me anymore”

Jenna Fischer made a conscious decision to step away from acting.

Now 52, the star of The Office reflected on her pivot to podcasting in 2019, when she and her costar, Angela Kinsey, launched Office Ladies, a rewatch podcast that revisited every episode of the hit NBC sitcom.

On the Aug. 18 episode of Dinner’s on Me, Fischer told host Jesse Tyler Ferguson that her hours were “so intense” when she was working on Splitting Up Together with Oliver Hudson, a sitcom they starred in as a divorced couple.

“I really loved that cast so much, but the hours were so intense. It was like 65, 70 hours a week,” she recalled. “It was really, really hard, and my kids were very small.”

Fischer shares son Weston, 14, and daughter Harper, 12, with husband Lee Kirk. When Splitting Up Together was canceled after two seasons in 2019, she knew that “being the lead of a television show or even a regular on a television show was not gonna be a fit for me anymore.”

“That’s when I pivoted into podcasting with Angela,” Fischer said. “And that afforded me a lifestyle with both a steady income and also I was now at every school drop-off, every school pick-up, every teacher conference, every concert. I didn’t have to beg someone to go to the Halloween parade. I was the agent of my own time, and that was great.”

One unexpected consequence of that is that her kids don’t see her as an actress. “Because they were so little when that change happened, they thought of me as a podcaster. Like, if anybody asked them, ‘What does your mom do?’ They [would say], ‘Oh, she’s a podcaster. She has a podcast.’ They didn’t even understand what my podcast was about.”

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When she and Kinsey, 55, announced the rewatch podcast in 2019, Fischer told PEOPLE, “We’ve been wanting to work together again ever since we stopped working together.”

“Angela and I became best friends because we were cast on The Office together, we worked together and saw each other every day. I think the hardest part for me about it ending was that I didn’t get to see my best friend every day anymore.”

Justin Lubin/NBCU Photo Bank

“We just said, ‘You know, next year is the 15th anniversary of the show and this seems like a really fun time to share our memories. How could we do that?’ And that’s how we came up with the idea of the podcast,” she said at the time.

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The podcast is now in its sixth season, and Fischer and Kinsey continue to love working together. “Rainn Wilson has always said that the two of us love to talk to each other, and I guess that’s true,” Kinsey told PEOPLE of her and her cohost in May. “And that we love to hear every nuance about everything in each other’s lives. My favorite thing, because we trade voice memos every day. It’s how we stay connected.”

“Because, I don’t know, there’s things in text that I can’t hear. Like, if you’re frustrated or tired or you know, and the ups and downs and the joys and the big moments and the small moments. And I just think it’s really special, and I love her dearly.”

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