Elizabeth Banks’s 30 Rock character, Avery Jessup, was almost played by actress Olivia Munn. And on Friday, she revealed that it was the show’s star, Alec Baldwin, who made the calls to have her replaced in the role.
Munn, 45, who is promoting her Apple TV+ show Your Friends & Neighbors, told the rest of the story behind her hiring and then removal from NBC’s 30 Rock in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter out Friday.
“I got the job…and then two days later, they were like, ‘Alec thinks that you look too young to play his love interest.’” Munn said the decision seemed to be up in the air for a while.
“Another two days later,” she’d heard, “‘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.’ Then Elizabeth Banks got that role.”
When the Avery Jessup character first appeared on the show in 2010, Banks was 36 to Baldwin’s 52. Munn was just 30 at the time.
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for Baldwin for comment.
Banks, now 52, played the love interest of Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy. She would go on to appear in 15 episodes, and eventually, the pair got married and had a family on the show.
30 Rock ended in 2013 after seven seasons. Munn was first reported to have “read” for the part in 2010, but she hadn’t explained what happened until Friday.
“Grace Wu at NBC casting brought me in,” Munn told THR. “Going into the audition, I felt really good about everything. I dressed for the part, which I’d never really done before. I signed in, and I walked outside near the sound stages. 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 it,” she explained.
“I got the call that I booked the job,” she added—at least until Baldwin intervened.
“What was interesting is that I think back on that and it would have been such a big, big break for me.” She went on to star in The Newsroom and play Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse, among other career highlights.
“I was not devastated,” she continued. “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.”
Munn concluded that she was happy to have had the validation. “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. “That’s what I needed. Whether or not I got the job didn’t affect my confidence.”
Munn shares a son, Malcolm, 4, and a daughter, Méi, 18 months, with SNL alum John Mulaney, whom she married in 2024.
