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.
