Tina Fey is wearing a matching pajama set, perched on the edge of an oversized chair and discussing her tenure as a receptionist at the Evanston, Illinois, YMCA in the early ’90s. The men were gross, the commute from Chicago was long, but it paid for her Second City improv classes.
This intimate scene plays out onstage for 5,000 people. It’s the audience Q&A closer during a Detroit stop on Fey and Amy Poehler’s Restless Leg Tour, where one attendee even asks the women, without any context, whether she should quit her job. (The answer is yes.) The two finish each show like this. They tailored the 90-minute set to their preferred wardrobes and bedtimes as much as their devoted fans’ tastes. Fey and Poehler can make it back to their respective hotel rooms and into their real PJs by 10 o’clock.
Later, Fey tells me about how things went the last time she tried to stay out long past midnight. It was February’s Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary. One of the most successful and recognizable figures to graduate from Studio 8H, Fey returned as a staff writer for the NBC special. And she intended to celebrate. “I’ve never been able to get over the fact that I left the 40th afterparty before Prince’s surprise set,” she says. “So the whole week leading up to the 50th, I drank water, I went to bed early, I saved it all up. But when I got to the afterparty, I couldn’t find any of my friends, and obviously there was no chance of Prince, so I thought, ‘Actually, I’m out.’ “
The parties are never what she remembers, anyway. It’s the planning, the problem-solving and the thrilling surrender to a finished product — of which there’ve been many. Over the quarter century since Fey broke out as an SNL wunderkind, the 54-year-old created and starred in 30 Rock, produced six other TV series, starred in more than a dozen films and wrote Mean Girls. She then made Mean Girls — more of a pop culture institution than a movie — into a 2018 Broadway musical with her composer husband, Jeff Richmond, and in turn adapted that into a movie musical.
And there are her collaborations with Poehler, this latest one a comedic homage to their 30-year friendship. Most material gets recycled from city to city, except for a segment that puts them back at the “Weekend Update” anchor desk they shared at SNL. During the first of two Detroit shows in April, 15 minutes of fresh material includes a joke about Elon Musk while an image of a burning Tesla projects behind them. The sold-out crowd, most of them white women and one of them my mother, scream-laughs in approval.
“Cranking these things out is not easy — they’re true labors,” says Poehler. “Yet no one is happier to get it right than Tina. When she comes up with a good idea, a good joke or some new take, she still gets delighted.”
Her newest take is on middle age. Fey and fellow 30 Rock writers Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher have adapted The Four Seasons, Alan Alda’s 1981 comedy about boomers navigating midlife crises, as a Netflix series out May 1. She stars alongside Steve Carell, Colman Domingo and Will Forte, marking her first regular on-camera TV role since 30 Rock wrapped in 2013. But over a few hours and many cups of coffee — discussing her evolving work-life balance, the pains of making the second Mean Girls movie and her “irreplaceable” mentor, Lorne Michaels — the multihyphenate almost exclusively refers to herself as a writer. She takes multiple detours into astrology and the Enneagram along the way, as well.
“While we’re on nonsense,” says Fey, “there’s all that talk about love languages. I give acts of service. If I like you, my way of showing that is to be like, ‘I wrote this for you.’ I try to help you fix the thing you’re doing. And if I don’t like you, I’m going to write you something so good that you’re going to be ashamed. Either way, I’m always out here hustling.”
“The only thing I ever think about when figuring out what’s next is to only make things that I myself would watch,” says Fey, “and that can be many different things.” Fey in Summer: Emilia Wickstead dress; Irene Neuwirth earrings, flower rings; Jacquie Aiche pavé ring; Anna Karin Karlsson sunglasses; Christian Louboutin pumps. Fashion Assistant: Elliott Pearson. Hair: Richard Marin at TMG for Oribe. Makeup: Mai Quynh at Forward Artists. Manicure: Jolene Brodeur at the Wall Group. Artistic and Fashion Director Alison Edmond. PHOTOGRAPHED BY NINO MUÑOZ
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Fey does not show up in a black car to the French café. It’s a rainy April morning in the Paris of the Midwest, and she arrives on foot. She sports a baseball cap embroidered with her production company’s logo: a doodle of firstborn Alice, then a toddler, dressed as the NBC peacock for Halloween. Alice turned 19 in September. Now it’s just Fey, Richmond and their youngest, 13-year-old Penelope, at home.
Her presence is more obvious as soon as she pulls off her cap. Garnier kept that mane under contract for a reason. Still, she is only approached once. Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, happens to be holding court in a nearby booth. He thanks her for putting the city on the tour itinerary before asking for a photo. Fey slips into her well-worn self-deprecation, talking her way out of a selfie by explaining that she’s not wearing makeup. This is half true.
“He seems very nice,” she says, voice lowered as she departs the mayor’s table, “but I do not know that man’s politics.” (Duggan, long a moderate Democrat, very controversially announced in December that he would run as an independent in the 2026 Michigan gubernatorial race.)
She says she’s not as reserved as she once was, but she’s clearly still skilled at vetting people. “Tina, like my husband, is a Taurus,” says Domingo, who didn’t know Fey personally before he boarded The Four Seasons. “When you first meet her, I wouldn’t say she’s guarded, but she’s assessing. She sizes you up, figures out her way in. The moment it clicks, she’s affectionate and warm and funny. I think I got there faster because I’m from Philadelphia.”
