Tina Fey is wearing her glasses. Her recurring character, the anchor minx on “Weekend Update,” sports the same specs on “Saturday Night Live.” And the little blue suit. Don’t forget the little blue suit.
But Fey tells us that she doesn’t actually need glasses to sit on a couch and talk. “I’m just wearing them for the press junket,” she says. So they are just for show.
Let us not be coy. The glasses are a powerful fetishistic object of allure and obsession. Fey knows it. We know it. And according to Google, everyone on the Internet knows it.
So this leads us to a question: Are we speaking with Tina Fey, the actress who wears costumes and props? Or Tina Fey, the 33-year-old behind-the-scenes head writer at “SNL” (the first woman to have the top job), credited in part with injecting a welcome dose of estrogen and reviving the faintly mildewy show beginning in the late 1990s?
Actor or writer? We’re not sure. We’re not sure Tina Fey is sure. But it is interesting. Because Fey is also the author of the screenplay for the new PG-13 teen comedy “Mean Girls,” which is why she is sitting in an airy suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, wearing her smarty-pants glasses and talking about naughty librarians.
Fey and her boss, “SNL” executive producer and father figure and “Mean Girls” producer Lorne Michaels, got the idea for the movie from a New York Times Magazine piece by Margaret Talbot that ran in 2002. The story focused on the work of Rosalind Wiseman, author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence.”
According to Wiseman, teen girls are not little angels. No, they are engaged, minute by minute, in way sophisticated and insidious social bullying and status competition. Think: a troop of baboons on the Discovery Channel.
Wiseman divides the adolescent jungle of “Girl World” into subspecies — the Queen Bee (head witch, fashion plate, ruler of the clique), the Sidekicks (the Bee’s handmaidens), the Banker (con artist and stool pigeon who trades on secrets), plus various wannabes, “torn bystanders” and, of course, “the targets.”
Wiseman treats this all rather seriously (the hyper-competition leads some girls toward sex and drugs). But when Fey read the Wiseman book, and the anecdotes from teen girls, she also thought they were hilarious — particularly the lengths Wiseman’s subjects would go to to mess with each other’s minds.
So we begin.
We liked your movie. It’s a teen movie but with these subversive moments.
“I tried to put a few little things in there. Health class, the way it’s portrayed. I had a really inept, inappropriate health class when I was in high school. I feel like schools and America in general are constantly changing their position on sex ed so the kids are confused. One minute it’s abstinence, then it’s ‘Here’s a bowl of condoms.’ ”
There is also a message about girls’ inhumanity to girls. (They’re as mean as a suitcase of snakes!) But the movie worked on a few different levels.
“We tried. We are hoping that some word of mouth gets out to adults that it’s safe to go see the movie.”
Because of the breasts?
“It really does have ’em!”
Makes us miss high school.
“It’s a fashion thing, too. Everything is served up to you more than when we were in school. There were a lot of turtleneck sweaters when I was in school.”
But you’re trying to win some hearts and minds? You’re trying to suggest that girls don’t have to be so cruel, so competitive?
“I don’t think we’ll change the world, but yeah. Because the movie is based on Rosalind Wiseman’s book, I felt a responsibility for the movie to have sort of a positive message. Rosalind also made me promise I wouldn’t turn it into a filthy, stupid, cheesy teen comedy, and I felt what she does and what she’s trying to do with the book is so serious and positive that I wanted it to be hopeful, too.”
All very noble. But consider: The movie is about how 15-year-old girls shouldn’t be so fixated on their bodies and fashion, yet one would be correct to wonder whether teens watching the movie might fixate on the clothes and bodies of the actresses — “fashion to die for,” as the production notes put it. The four principals make more than 130 costume changes. In a 93-minute film.
And the bodies of lead actresses Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lizzy Caplan and Lacey Chabert? The director, Mark S. Waters, told us: “It wasn’t intentional. We didn’t decide, let’s look for girls with big jugs. They all just happened to be well-endowed young ladies.” So it’s a happy accident.
When Waters and Paramount Pictures test-marketed “Mean Girls” to focus groups and asked them what scenes they liked most, the girls said they liked the Christmas play skit or the bus running over a character. The boys? “Some of them just wrote the word ‘boobs,’ ” Waters said.
We read your essay in CosmoGirl! in which you confess, “I ate weaker girls for breakfast.” You were an unpleasant teen yourself?
“The movie, it’s part of my recovery, my making amends to society. I was a really snarky girl. My whole thing was if I really liked a guy and he had the audacity to like someone else instead of me, I would hate that girl and devote hours and hours of time to picking her apart and talking about her behind her back and canvassing my friends to dislike her. Just a waste of time, ridiculous, but when you’re going through it at that age, you’re making yourself sick with bile and hurting other people and their feelings.”
Why is it? Has it always been thus?
“Something happens to girls when puberty kicks in and a certain amount of boy-craziness starts.”
Thank God.
“And clearly in this movie, puberty has kicked in!”
Big time.
“The competition starts. I remember feeling at that time, you don’t know what it is, something has changed and you’re being judged by the way you look, and even though you don’t want it, you want to win the contest. You kind of lose your mind a little bit, and your friendships with other girls suffer accordingly.”
You were raised in Upper Darby, suburban Philadelphia. Then you go to the University of Virginia, where you were quite the party animal?
“I was so not a party animal at U-Va.! I was the only nonparty animal at U-Va. I was up to my neck in this little drama department there. In this homogeneous white school, I was in a tiny, relatively diverse department.”
You graduate and move to Chicago to get a job handing out clean towels?
“I moved to Chicago right after school. To be 22 and living in a huge city for the first time. Looking back it feels a lot more brave than it felt at the time.”
And it was Chicago because of the comedy troupe Second City?
“I had a vague notion Second City was there, and I just wanted to be near it. To see what I could do. I trained there and at the ImprovOlympic — which is Charna Halpern’s theater, both of those. And this is where I met all my dearest friends in my life now — I met at that time.”
And the improv experience? That made you? That was where you learned your craft?
“I trained as an actor at U-Va., and we studied this basic Stanislavsky method, and I faked my way through it. It never made sense to me, I never understood, what am I actually supposed to be thinking about onstage — the fake childhood memory that endows this scene with — what? I never got it.”
But obviously you figured it out.
“When I started improv, it was a method of working that instantly clicked for me. It finally made sense for me. It made me a better actor than acting training had. The whole thing with improv is taking focus off yourself and putting it on your partner or honoring the suggestion. You’ve opened yourself up to associate more freely, and that all finally made sense to me as a form of actor training, and I became completely addicted to it. It tapped into the writer part of my brain and the actor part all at the same time. For me, studying improv was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and the people I studied with all felt the same way. It was like a cult. We were obsessed. It really changed my life.”
We’ve always wondered: With 20 writers on “SNL,” yourself and this incredible pool of talent, how in God’s name does a lame skit get on air?
“It’s a little harder than it looks.”
But you know, the bombs, and we mean that in the most complimentary and flattering way.
“There’s a lot of reasons. One reason is everyone’s taste is different. A lot of times a weird non-sequitur sketch, I’ll have five friends from home saying pee-hew, what the *%@#! was that? and three friends saying that was the #$(@*! best thing ever. Part is that we go week to week. Sometimes we swing, sometimes we miss.”
The Clinton administration. Must be sorely missed on “SNL.”
“It was a heyday for comedy writers because it was an unbelievably large, nonviolent, victimless sex scandal. I’m sure a Republican figure could extrapolate it to prove it caused 9/11, but at the time it all seemed like pure ridiculousness.”
And your politics are?
“I will tell you in New York I’m a registered independent, and that I grew up in a really Republican household in a really Republican town, so while I don’t necessarily vote that way I don’t like jokes that are too knee-jerk. I like jokes that Lorne would call fair hits. Because I think you lose credibility if you just start to knee-jerk one way or the other.”
An aside: Fey is a wee dissembler when it comes to how she uses her looks to market herself. This is sweet in a way, though disingenuous. She pretends to be bemused by all the attention. In 1998, however, as a new writer at “SNL,” she decided to lose 30 pounds. And as she told Bust magazine, “once I lost weight, things started picking up for me.” She was named by People magazine last year as one of its 50 Most Beautiful People. “It’s always, like, 47 unbelievably stunning actors and, like, a Chinese athlete, me and a good-looking guy in a wheelchair,” Fey says. But she shows up at the Emmy Awards in couture — with the glasses. She frets that her image appeared in the laddy bible Maxim, but she posed for another magazine spread dressed in nylons and garter belt, a pen to her lips. So . . . it’s complicated. But not talking about Fey’s looks is like not talking about Chris Farley’s gut. May he rest in peace.
Okay, everyone always asks about it, but the glasses? Where do the glasses come for your newscaster character on “Weekend Update”?
“Here’s the thing. Because a lot of people say those glasses are fake, right, because a dude from the New York Observer got it wrong. I need glasses to see far away, so I don’t really need to be wearing them now, but I’m wearing them for the press junket. But I need to wear them to read my cue cards.”
Your Internet boyfriends and girlfriends (Fey is married to a composer on “SNL”) sure are fixated on them. Are they thinking of the naughty librarian?
“It seems to push a button.”
And?
“I think it’s a fetish. I think it’s that I look like a teacher or something.”
And now you play a math teacher in glasses, Ms. Norsbury, in “Mean Girls.” You’re the screenwriter. You’re a character in your own movie. And so you decided to write a scene in which your character takes off her shirt? (Revealing a bra.)
“And now I play one and I take my shirt off — not all the way off! I know people are going to see this and think I wanted to take off my shirt.”
Hmmmm . . .
“It was a gag. My friend Michael Schur” — a fellow “SNL” writer — “actually gave me the gag. And we were laughing about it because I feel very free to shop my friends for gags, and that’s a gag I haven’t seen before. In my brain I knew it came from my friend, so it didn’t seem creepy, but then every time I see it I go, ‘Aaahh, people are going to think I wanted to take off my shirt.’ ”
It works.
“It’s a funny gag, right?”
Totally!
Tina Fey says she was “snarky” as a teen — a trait “Mean Girls” explores. Fey with her signature glasses on “Saturday Night Live” (with Jimmy Fallon in 2002) and sans the specs in “Mean Girls.” The movie, she says, is “part of my recovery, my making amends to society” for being a catty teenager.