Tina Fey is talking about princesses. Plastic princesses. As in the Disney series of figures and accessories, which her 2-year-old daughter is crazy about—and which, it must be said, Fey is not. “I think this is ingenious marketing, but that princess thing sets off an alarm bell for me,” Fey says. We’re having lunch at a café not far from her home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“You’re afraid…,” I begin.
“All that might creep back into our culture,” she says. “That a girl would really aspire to be the Little Mermaid, a beautiful redhead with no legs who waits for her prince! Who literally gives up her voice!” She laughs. “What are we doing? What’s going on?”
The 37-year-old comedy writer and actress—she of the black-rimmed spectacles, high cheekbones and wicked sense of humor—is just half-joking. Or is it half-serious? Whichever, it’s a style she honed to perfection in her tenure as a writer, featured performer and co-anchor of the hugely popular “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live. That dry wit has carried perfectly to 30 Rock, the critically acclaimed NBC sitcom she created in 2006. (Fey is producer, head writer and co-star, along with Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan. Her husband, Jeff Richmond, a composer and musician, also works on the show.)
From 1999 until she left, Fey wasn’t just a writer on Saturday Night Live—she was the show’s first female head writer. And she clearly is proud of her many accomplishments, including a 2002 writing Emmy for SNL, even though she’s modest about the position. “The skill you need for it is not necessarily to be the funniest person in that group,” she says. “What you need to be is a kind of conduit between the producers and the writers.”
30 Rock was more problematic. When the sitcom, based on an SNL-like comedy program, started in the fall of 2006, critics were crazy about its rapid-fire, razor-sharp comedy, but viewers stayed away. Then NBC moved the show from Wednesday to Thursday night, and the audience grew. The network renewed the show for a second season—and last fall Fey won an Emmy for producing the show. In her speech, she thanked the show’s “dozens and dozens of viewers.” This January, she won a Golden Globe for acting on 30 Rock.
Coming up, Fey has her first starring film role, opposite her old friend and “Weekend Update” co-anchor Amy Poehler, in Baby Mama, a comedy about an uptight Philadelphia businesswoman (Fey) who hires a wrong-side-of-the-tracks surrogate (Poehler) to bear her child. (The film will hit theaters April 25.)
Something about the idea of a successful woman in her mid-30s trying to have both a family and a career hit home. “I think my generation has been slightly tricked in that you’re really encouraged to try to have it all,” she tells me. “And sometimes your body will not let you wait as long as you want.”
In 2005, Fey decided she had waited long enough. In September of that year, she gave birth to her daughter Alice, took a 43-day maternity leave and returned to SNL seemingly without breaking stride. Her comment at the time: “I had to get back to work. NBC has me under contract; the baby and I only have a verbal agreement.”
But the hard work really began once she was in charge of her own show: “We wrap shooting on a normal day by 7 p.m.,” she tells me. “Most times, I then bring three or four writers home with me. I’ll put Alice to bed before they come over, then we continue writing until I can no longer stay awake.” One time, she says, she awoke the next morning to find the writers in her living room, still hard at work.
Fey smiles wearily. “It’s very full,” she says. “But I would be lying if I said there were not tears involved at home occasionally—just occasionally. Last spring, my husband was trying to joke around with me. I was saying, ‘Please stop talking. I’m trying to go to sleep,’ and he kept talking. Out of the blue—he still mentions it, that I had the most terrifying look on my face—I just went, ‘Stop it!!!’ and shoved him across the bed. The life of the working parent is constantly saying, ‘This is impossible,’ and then you just keep doing it.”
Fey had the feeling early on that she could try to do anything at all. “I’m 37,” she says. “Ours was the generation of Title IX. It was like, ‘We’re going to sign you up for coed baseball, and you’re going to play basketball…’ It was a good time to be a girl. You know, watching The Bad News Bears—it was takeover time.”
Fey grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Upper Darby, Pa., the daughter of a college grant writer and a housewife. She was funny from the start. At 7, she drew a picture of two people holding hands and carrying wedges of Swiss cheese, with the caption: “What a friend we have in cheeses.”
“Everyone was pretty funny in the house,” she recalls. “But the other thing was that my parents were always very generous with encouragement and praise.”
After graduating from the University of Virginia (she studied playwriting and acting) in 1992, Fey moved to Chicago to take classes in improvisation at Second City. It was there that she discovered her true strength: “When we had the curtain call at the end of the show, I received the lightest amount of applause,” she says. “I was never an audience favorite particularly. But I knew that I had helped build a lot of the scenes everyone liked. That was my contribution.”
Fey is a big favorite now—sharpening her performing skills over time. Still, she knows that time is not an actress’ friend. “I think for women especially, you need to have a plan,” she says. “I need to have some other ways to generate income, so I don’t have to stretch my face or lift the top of my head with surgery or something.”
She’s giving me that half-serious look again. Or is it half-joking? “I often feel like a complete fool,” she says. “I’m here laboring over this tiny show so much, and around me people are making money by the fistful. It’s like, ‘Oh, man, how can I turn my personality into a line of crappy products?’ Rachael Ray sells, like, spoons. I could sell pencils.”
She probably won’t have to.