Wendy McLendon-Covey

On the day I was handed the sides...

And those sides were, as you guys know, wildly different.

They had taken out any profession of love at all, made it purely about her sort of artistic sensibilities, and changed how that was gonna go.

So when we were filming,

Um, I will admit this is a fault of mine as an actor.

I couldn't get it out of my head because again, everything we had been playing so far was that Alex had a crush on Pam.

And like you guys said with Steven, um, what Alex ends up saying is enough.

It didn't need to be this on-the-nose sort of profession of love.

It's implied, it's intrinsic.

As Jim says, you know, this guy's into you.

I mean, it's clearly there, but in the moment, I couldn't find the right level of demonstrative that Steven wanted.

And the level that Steven wanted was zero.

I was continually pumping out was more in the neighborhood of like 75% demonstrative.

I couldn't reel it in.

And in fact, Jenna, to your question of pooping my pants when I found out it was Stephen Merchant, that was just a little jitter compared to how I felt when Stephen...

Oh, no.

He came up to me after a take and said these words, the words that have haunted me as an actor forever.

He came up to me and said, I don't know why you're not getting this.

So he was, by the way, 100 percent right.

I just couldn't do it.