“I realized I’ve never cried over an Emmy or a Golden Globe,” Fey said on the ‘Today’ show. “It must have meant more to me than I realized because I’m just so proud of this show and everybody involved.”
Tina Fey was brought to tears — the good kind, of course — when she heard that her Broadway adaptation of Mean Girls scored 12 Tony nominations, including best musical and best book of a musical.
The actress, writer and producer made a Thursday morning appearance on the Today show, where she told Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb about her unexpectedly emotional reaction to Tuesday’s news.
“Well, I was at the gym because fitness is my life,” Fey jokingly began. “And I was afraid to watch it on TV, so my friend was with me and he was scrolling through the internet and all this good news started to rain down on us.”
According to the Saturday Night Live alum, that’s when the waterworks came. “I started crying,” she continued. “I cried in the middle of Equinox, and I was not the first, I’m sure, and I won’t be the last. It was sweaty tears.”
She added: “And I realized I’ve never cried over an Emmy or a Golden Globe. It must have meant more to me than I realized because I’m just so proud of this show and everybody involved.”
During her interview on Today, Fey also explained why she felt the need to differentiate Mean Girls the musical from the iconic 2004 film, starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, off which it was based.
“We had it updated a little bit because in the movie, Regina George literally has a flip phone,” she said. “The world has changed a lot around us, so we wanted to make it so that it wasn’t just the movie on stage.”
Last month, Fey opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about how the show fits into current cultural movements like #MeToo and Time’s Up, which have inspired a heightened sense of female empowerment.
“It’s about how being cruel to other people is only a poison that you’re taking yourself,” she said after Mean Girls‘ opening night on Broadway. “Right now, that feels particularly relevant because of the relational aggression we’re seeing spread across our society.”
While chatting with Guthrie and Kotb, Fey also expressed her enthusiasm over hosting SNL for its upcoming season finale. “The head writer in me is like, ‘OK, they’re going to be tired. I need to bring some ideas,'” she said of preparing for her return. “So I look around and I go, ‘Who’s old enough for me to play? Stormy Daniels, maybe. Who can I play?’ It’s really fun.”
At the end of her interview, Fey was asked to share her thoughts on fellow comedian Michelle Wolf’s controversial White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue. Although Fey believes Wolf “did her job,” she assured Guthrie and Kotb that she is in no way, nor ever has been, envious of hosting the gig.
“First of all, every year when it’s the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, my first thought is, ‘I’m so happy I’m not hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.’ It is the roughest room. You have to go in there with a Norm MacDonald [mentality, like], ‘I don’t care what you think of this,'” admitted Fey.
“I think Michelle went and did her job. You can’t ask a coyote to guard the henhouse. You invite a comedian into that place where that tone is set, they’re going to give it to you straight. And I think that’s pretty much what she did,” she concluded, before joking, “But maybe next year, a children’s choir?”
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