Tina Fey has tried to live by certain pieces of advice from fellow Saturday Night Live veteran Steve Martin.
“Something I think about a lot and I fall short of it constantly, but a million years ago, I was a writer at SNL and Steven Martin came to do something on the show,” Fey, 54, said on the Tuesday, March 18, episode of Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast. “He wasn’t hosting, but he came to do something on the show. He had just been on [Late Show With David] Letterman the night before and I said, ‘Oh, hi, how are you doing? You were so funny on Letterman last night.’”
According to Fey, Martin, now 79, “matter-of-factly” responded.
“[He] said, ‘Oh, well, you have to kill every time,’” Fey recalled. “That has haunted me every day since. He’s right and it’s, like, if you’re a beautiful actress … you can go on and be like, ‘I went to the store once,’ but if you’re a comedy person, you have to kill every time? Oh, God.”
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While Fey has been performing for decades — she got her start on SNL — she’s never felt like she’s nailed an audition.
“I’m not really so interesting on paper,” she quipped. “I remember going to commercial auctions in Chicago. At that time, Chicago was a thriving town for commercials. I don’t know if it still is, but there were huge ad agencies based there and they would shoot things in Chicago. A lot of people that we worked with at Second City [comedy club] would get a lot of work for their whole year.”
According to Fey, she ultimately did “a little bit” of voiceover work in the Windy City.
“I had a bite-and-smile type thing, where it was a McDonald’s audition,” Fey recalled. “Everything was always, like, ‘OK, take two trains and a thing and get [taken] out to wherever this audition is and, then you get there, and it was for some kind of happy or drive-thru meal. I went all the way to the thing, I got there and I realized as we were going into the sessions, like, ‘Oh, this commercial is for a person pulling into a drive-thru’ and I have this scar on the left side of my face.”
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Fey immediately knew she wouldn’t book the job because of the “prominent” scar on her face, which she’s had since childhood.
“I was like, ‘What are we doing here? I traveled 45 minutes each way. What are we talking about?” Fey added.
The comedian’s career has since flourished since the aforementioned McDonald’s rejection.
“I am a work-based person,” Fey, who shares daughters Alice, 19, and Penelope, 13, with husband Jeff Richmond, said. “I have just really recently found that I have — because I went through such a stretch for so many decades where I was like ‘You go to work for 12 to 13 hours and then you come home’ — and only in the last year or two, had windows of time where I [didn’t] have homework tonight [and] I can just be a person in this world and maybe watch a program.”
