Amy Poehler
Spotlight By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com
Amy Poehler may be petite, but she’s hugely funny. She proved her knack for all things comedic for blah seasons on SNL and most recently, her dead-on impersonation of Senator Hillary Clinton drew raves from the former first lady herself. Poehler has also been lucky in her film and television roles, somehow always managing to co-star alongside the people she loves. Whether it’s getting to be hilarious with her equally as humorous husband Will Arnett in films like Blades of Glory, or kicking it with her real-life close friend Tina Fey in movies like Mean Girls and the new Baby Mama, Poehler continually finds herself in good company. In Baby Mama she plays an unrefined surrogate named Angie who agrees to have single careerwoman Kate’s baby. And although Poehler plays it coy in this interview, she just recently announced that she will indeed become a real baby mama come this fall—she and Arnett are expecting their first child!
But first let’s talk about the other love of her life: Tina Fey. How did the two get along when they first met?
“I was like I finally found the woman I want to marry,” Poehler deadpans.
“And then I had to break it to you that that’s not legal,” Fey chimes in.
In actuality the two gifted comediennes met when they were merely students dreaming of making it big. There was a mutual admiration right off the bat. “We met in 1993 in Chicago,” Poehler says. “I had heard about Tina on the streets before I met her but we were both new improvisers who had moved from where we were going to college to study improv and we performed together on an improv team named after a bad porn movie called ‘Inside Vladimir’—gay porn movie. Not necessarily bad. And so we were the two women on that improv team and that’s where we met. So we knew each other when we were kind of just big eye-browed, poor, badly dressed ducklings.”
As it turns it, it wasn’t a bad time to be honing their talent in Chicago. “That time in Chicago at least was a time when there was a lot of really fertile talent coming out of Chicago,” she says. “I know that Colbert and Carrell and Amy Sedaris—all these people were performing. And Rachel Dratch and Horatio Sans and Adam McKay were kind of coming up with us then at that time too, so it was an interesting time to be there.”
Poehler and Fey’s friendship stayed strong through their time at SNL together. Baby Mama pits them as opposites. Fey’s Kate is the more responsible, put-together character, while Angie is free-spirited and loud-mouthed. The labor scene in particular was a chance for Poehler to really let loose. “There’s a lot a birth movies that never talk about how foul people’s mouths get during it so that was a fun thing and it was all one shot so as Tina was pushing me down the hall
