Olivia Munn recently revealed that she auditioned to play Avery Jessup on 30 Rock—and got the part. “Going into the audition, I felt really good about everything,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I dressed for the part, which I’d never really done before. I signed in and I walked outside near the soundstages. Normally I’d want to be right there. I’d want them to see me. I just had this confidence like, ‘They’ll come find me.’ I kept working on it until I got into the room. I just stayed in [the character]. I got the call that I booked the job.”
However, a few days after Munn was told she had the role, she was fired. She claimed it was because Alec Baldwin, the star of the series, insisted that Munn looked too young to play his young interest. At the time, Baldwin was 52 and Munn was 30.
As she explained, “The end of that story is that I got the job… and then two days later, they were like, ‘Alec thinks that you look too young to play his love interest.’ Another two days later, ‘No, no, no. They think you’re perfect. You’re going to fly out on Saturday.’ On Friday, ‘No, no, no. Alec thinks that you look too young and he’s putting his foot down.’”
Despite the circumstances, Munn said she wasn’t devastated over the loss. “These people, iconic people—Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, Grace Wu at NBC casting—they all thought that I was good enough to have gotten the offer,” she said. “I only thought to myself, ‘Wow, look how far I got.' I ended up not getting the job because of something I couldn’t control. On my ability and my acting, I got it. It gave me so much confidence.”
The role of Avery Jessup ended up going to Elizabeth Banks, who was 36 at the time. The character first appeared on the show in 2010 during season four. She was a reporter who hit it off with Baldwin’s character and eventually married him.
