Tina Fey opens up about harsh remark to Sylvester Stallone, her first week on SNL

Tina Fey remembers a rough start to her time at Saturday Night Live.

Performs in SNL50: Beyond Saturday NightPeacock’s new four-part docu-series looking back at the late-night show’s history, the writer-turned-star recalls being surprised by the attitude around rewrites.

Fey admits the sketch show is partly driven by competition.

“Although all at SNL working together to make one thing, but no. It is built on competition. It is built so that ‘we will see each other at the table’, she says.

“I have to say as a head writer, I came in from Chicago and I was ready to fight anybody, but the rewrite tables were tough. They were nasty,” she recalls of her time behind the scenes, which began in 1997.

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“People would take the recap of the show and just go sketch by sketch and make fun of it, like the title and make fun of it, goof on it, goof on it, goof on it. You’d leave the room knowing full well, that the writers’ room took a s— out of it while you were gone, and that’s just the way it was.”

Fey adds, “I don’t know if it’s the same anymore, and if it’s not, maybe it should be like that again a little bit.”

Laughing, she admits: “I think it’s good.”

That wasn’t the only challenge of being a newbie SNL though for Fey. Her early days presented her with another difficult task: giving a fix to Sylvester Stallone.

“I think maybe my first week as a writer, Sylvester Stallone (host), and a note came back that said, ‘Tell him to speak more. We can’t understand him.’ And then the writer that I worked with, he was more experienced, and he said ‘Okay, you’re going to do it.’ ”

“But it’s a big ordeal,” says Fey. “Mr. Stallone was very nice about it. It was clearly not the first time in his life that he had received that note.” Fey joined the show’s cast in 2000 and left in 2006. She has since returned to host the show six times, making her a member of the series’ Five-Timers Club.

Learn more about the history of the late night item by watching SNL50: Beyond Saturday Nightnow streaming on Peacock.