Tina Fey Once Had 1 Thing in Common With the Queen Bees in ‘Mean Girls’ Back in High School
Tina Fey once played a teacher in Mean Girls trying to guide a student of hers on the right path. But back in Fey’s own high school days, the actor confided she could have a bit of a mean streak herself.
How Tina Fey ended up writing ‘Mean Girls’
The hit 2004 film Mean Girls was adapted from the nonfiction book Queen Bees & Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman. Fey stumbled onto the book during her days working for Saturday Night Live. After reading it, she thought it had good enough material for a film. She brought the idea to Lorne Michaels, who agreed.
“When I first pitched it to Lorne, I was thinking I’d like to write a movie about what they call ‘relational aggression’ among girls. He was like, ‘Okay, but could they also still have cool cars and cool clothes?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, for sure,’” Fey recalled in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Tina Fey had 1 thing in common with the queen bees in ‘Mean Girls’
Back in Fey’s own high school days, the actor considered herself to be a model student. By her own admission, she was involved in many school programs and lived a somewhat straight-edged lifestyle.
“When I was in high school, I was pretty much an AP student and just kind of a dork,” she once said in an interview with MTV News. “I was in choir and on the school paper, and I never drank, and I never smoked, and I was like, ‘People who drink are stupid!’ I was just a real goody two-shoes.”
However, Fey did share certain unwanted traits with the Plastics in Mean Girls.
“I was also kind of a jealous girl and mean,” she said. “If I liked a guy and he liked some other girl, I’d be unbelievably mean about that girl. I would just talk to my friends about her for hours and hours and say bad stuff about her. I really wasted a lot of my time doing that.”
But it was a habit of hers that Fey soon purged out of her system.
“It was like ‘I don’t want to feel like I ate poison anymore.’ And then I figured out that I could just stop judging others,” she said according to Parade.
How Tina Fey dealt with actual Plastics in her High School
Fey’s high school had its own share of Plastics that were somewhat similar to the ones in Mean Girls. But according to the 30 Rock star, the ones Fey knew weren’t nearly as malicious or vain as the ones in the movie.
“But, mostly it wasn’t even that I, like, talked to them, but they were girls that were just, like, famous within school. You just, for whatever reason, you knew they were better off than you. You just knew everything about them. You knew who they were going out with and you kinda knew, ‘Oh, they’re wearing a new sweater.’ Even though you never talked to them, they were just celebrities within school,” Fey once said in an interview with IGN.
