Tina Fey

Spotlight By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

Tina Fey can do no wrong these days. She's a smart writer and a gifted actress who first found success on SNL and then scored a big-screen hit with 2004's Mean Girls (which she wrote and co-starred in). Now she basically runs the hilarious NBC hit comedy 30 Rock. In her new flick Baby Mama, Fey re-teams with her former SNL co-star and real-life old friend Amy Poehler. Fey plays a career-woman desperate to have a baby, and Poehler is the lower-class woman who agrees to be her surrogate.

Fey, who has a 3-year-old daughter of her own, knows what it's like to have a baby, but just in case she forgot there were experts on set to remind her. 'We had some experts on set who were these wonderful, very earthy women,' she says. 'There was one lady who came up to me and was like, 'Are you thinking of having another child'' and I was like, 'No' and she was like, 'Well you should consider a water birth.' I was like, 'Right, but did you hear the part where I said no'''

Fey enjoys raising her child in the city, but admits there are some experiences that are truly unique to being a city parent. 'It is a different thing to be a city parent and there's this pressure of like what classes are your children taking'' she says. 'My daughter starts preschool next year so I just went through the process of taking her to her preschool interviews, and you're hoping just please don't poop yourself. She wore a little power suit, a little briefcase and she had a little teeny tiny resume made of candy. That you don't find in the suburbs I don't think.'

Pregnancy-themed movies like Knocked Up and Juno seem to be the new trend in recent times. Both are different from Baby Mama, but Fey thinks she knows why so many films seem to have baby fever. 'I think it's a universal experience and maybe there a generation of comedy writers who are all getting to that age where they're having kids and the guys who would have written their dating fantasy comedies 15 years ago are'people write what they know and it might just be a little bit of generational thing.'

Kate, her character is Baby Mama, is not dissimilar from Liz Lemon, her character on 30 Rock. Both are career-oriented single women working in the city, but Fey believes Kate is different in a lot of ways. 'She is higher functioning than Liz Lemon,' she says. 'She's a successful business person, she's a more pulled-together confident person. We talked a lot in the costume design that this is a woman who, her clothes are different. She's sort of mainline Philadelphia, pulled-together, old family jewelry. I certainly think this character is WASP-ier than I am in real life because I'm not WASP-y at all. I said we've got to pretend like she really has straight hair, which my hair's like a giant bush. I think her speech is a little different. It would've been a disservice to the movie to go koo-koo far and make that distinction because they are East Coast white women in their 30s. They're not that far but they are different hopefully.'

Speaking of differences, Fey and Poehler's characters are polar opposites. In real-life though, the two comediennes get along great. Of course, they both worked together on SNL, but the two actually go way back. They first met in an improv class in Chicago. 'I had sort of heard of Amy before,' Fey says. 'We were in separate classes and I was like, 'oh this girl is really good, she's so great' and then we were on the same [improv] team together and we really hit it off. It was a really nice group of people on that team; we all really hit it off. I think we've always had a mutual respect for each other because we both took improv super-seriously at the time and still kind of do.'

Another co-star on Baby Mama, Sigourney Weaver, proved to be a real treat for Fey. 'She was incredibly delightful we were so shocked and pleased that she agreed to be in the movie and she's really funny and very warm,' she says. 'On screen I think she plays a lot of strong, cold characters but she's very warm and she got to improvise a lot in the movie and I really enjoyed it.'

Fey genuinely enjoys what she does and she continues to make 30 Rock consistently funny. But while some think the show's jokes can be risqu', Fey doesn't think so. 'I take great pride in operating within the boundaries of the standard's rules,' she says. 'I think it's harder to make comedy when you can't curse. I don't think I realized how shocked people might be by the term 'MILF Island' and how many places wouldn't even print it. The New York Post would not even print the word MILF.'

With her real-life mom status and maternal-themed movie, some might consider Fey a MILF in her own right!