The Office star Jenna Fischer shares the backstory of Pam and Roy's long engagement
Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey have been dropping behind-the-scenes gems about The Office on their new podcast Office Ladies, in which they break down an episode of the beloved NBC comedy each week. In the latest episode, Fischer reveals the story behind the long engagement between her character, Pam, and fiancé Roy (David Denman).
The backstory comes up in Fischer and Kinsey’s discussion of the fifth episode of the comedy’s freshman season, “Basketball,” in which Dunder Mifflin boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) challenges the warehouse crew to a basketball game against the office staff.
In “Basketball,” viewers learn that Pam and Roy have been engaged for three years because they’ve been saving up for the wedding of their dreams, with Roy confessing at one point that he spent the money they’d been saving on jet skis. On Office Ladies, Fischer gives insight into that scene and how it ended up on the show, with a little help from producer Greg Daniels.
“My backstory was that they had been saving money for the wedding and about a year into their engagement — without telling Pam — Roy spent the money on a pair of wave runners,” Fischer recalls. “So he and his brother bought these pair of wave runners with their wedding money, but Roy was like, ‘We’re going to have so much fun with these!’ So it broke Pam’s heart.”
She continues, “I told Greg this story, just bantering with him, and he was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love that. We gotta put that in. We gotta put that in, the wave runners.’”
Though things didn’t work out between Pam and Roy, Fischer says she and Denman became close friends after working together on the show.
“I have to say — this is a funny thing — David Denman and I really hit it off,” she says. “We are good friends in real life. We especially hit it off in this episode, and it was weird because I think I had spent a lot of time talking to John Krasinski between scenes. And now I was talking to David Denman.”
She adds, “It’s probably a weird thing for people to imagine, that one of my best connections on the show was with David Denman.”
Kinsey admits that a lot of the show’s cast members made up backstories for their characters. For example, it was Kinsey who invented her character’s cat Sprinkles (#RIPSprinkles).
Listen to the the full Office Ladies episode above.
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