Vanity Fair’s January cover story is on “America’s New Sweetheart” Tina Fey and (being Vanity Fair and all) it primarily focuses on how Fey transformed from being the frumpy 25-year-old virgin who one agent assumed was having an affair with Lorne Michaels to the sexy librarian The New Yorker recently called “the sex symbol for every man who reads without moving his lips.”
And while going on Weight Watchers when she was still just a writer at SNL in order to become “PBS pretty” may have had something to do with it, Alec Baldwin shares with the magazine the only advice he’s given to his-costar since the inception of 30 Rock:
“I’d say to her, ‘‘You know, you’re a really beautiful girl. You’ve got to play that. It’s a visual medium. This is not Upright Citizens Brigade, where we’re doing sketch comedy at nine o’clock at night on a Sunday for a bunch of drunken college graduate students. You are a very attractive woman and you’ve got to work that. You’ve got to pop one more button on that blouse and you’ve got to get that hair done and you’ve got to go!’... There is Liz Lemon and there is Liz Lemon as portrayed by a leading actress in a TV show. It’s not a documentary. Tina’s a beautiful girl. We needed to get the pillows fluffed on the sofa and we needed to get the drapes steamed, and we needed to get everything all nice and get the presentation just right.”
All of that pillow-fluffing seems to have done the trick as the article recounts how Fey is now every dirty old man’s fantasy, turning the heads of everyone from Rip Torn to Steve Martin. Even the story’s author, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, seems to be cast under the spell of Liz Lemon, describing her at one point as being “like Daisy Buchanan, except her voice is full of funny rather than money.”
Also, the big scoop in Dowd's article is how Fey got her scar: Apparently a stranger slashed her when she was five years old. FIVE!
