5 Actors Who Auditioned For (And Didn’t Get) Famous Sitcom Roles
Audition tapes from The Office feature a virtual who’s who of 21st-century American comedy, with Seth Rogan, Adam Scott, Eric Stonestreet, John Cho, Bob Odenkirk, Kathryn Hahn, Judah Friedlander and Patton Oswalt all trying and failing to land a spot on the sitcom.
It’s a fascinating sliding-doors exercise — what if Odenkirk had been Michael Scott? — but The Office isn’t the only show for which famous comedy actors auditioned without success. Here are five more examples of TV stars who were in the wrong place at the wrong time…
Tiffani Thiessen, ‘Friends’
Kelly Kapowski could have been Rachel Green. “Did you know I tested for Friends, for Jennifer Aniston?” Thiessen said on SiriusXM's You Up With Nikki Glaser, per Entertainment Weekly. “I was just a little too young. I was a little too young to the pairing of the rest of them.”
Indeed, Saved By the Bell’s Thiessen was only 20 years old when she auditioned for the sitcom. At 25, Aniston eventually became the youngest member of the Friends cast. Instead, Thiessen became Valerie Malone on Beverly Hills, 90210.
Jim Parsons, ‘How I Met Your Mother’
In addition to auditioning for Dwight on The Office and Kenneth on 30 Rock, Parsons was also a finalist to play — wait for it — Barney on How I Met Your Mother. He was called back multiple times for the role. “I didn’t want to audition for it because they described him in the casting breakdown as a ‘big lug of a guy,’” Parsons says in The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series. “I was like, What are they fucking thinking?! I’m not a big lug of a guy! And then when Neil Patrick Harris got it, I was like, Oh, talk about a lesson!”
Megan Mullally, ‘King of Queens’
Mullally auditioned for the role of Carrie on King of Queens, a part that ultimately went to Leah Remini. Ironically, Remini auditioned for Karen Walker over on Will & Grace. “Megan actually went to the King of Queens audition, didn't get it and was in her apartment devastated when the Will & Grace casting people said, ‘You need to come in for this, it’s a great part for you,’” Remini told MediaVillage. “She said, ‘No, I wanted King of Queens!’”
Michael Richards, ‘Married… With Children’
Richards was one of the actors who auditioned to play Al Bundy on Married… With Children. “He was just odd. It was just a very odd read,” said casting director Marc Hirschfeld in Married… With Children vs. The World. “The challenge was that the material was bigger than life and most of these actors came in and played it extremely broad.” Hirschfield remembered the weirdo audition, however, and later cast Richards as Kramer on Seinfeld.
Sabrina Carpenter, ‘The Conners’
“Sabrina Carpenter auditioned,” Whitney Cummings revealed to PEOPLE. (Cummings was briefly a showrunner for The Conners.) “And it wasn’t the right fit. She got a rejection that day when we were casting the daughter.’
Carpenter, who’d previously starred in Girl Meets World, had to settle for becoming a pop superstar. “Thank God we said no to her,” Cummings said, “because she’d be stuck on a sitcom set and not being Sabrina Carpenter.”
