Tina Fey rang in the Easter weekend by appearing on BBC's Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, where the Date Night star hit the Brits with some 30 Rock knowledge. The first lesson: Liz Lemon is actually a Sliding Doors-version of Tina Fey. The second lesson: Alec Baldwin, although the only real actor on the Emmy-winning series, has never seen an episode of the show. At least, that is what Fey deduced after filming 30 Rock's season finale, "Khonani," which pokes fun at the recent NBC late-night wars. Spoilerphobes beware.
During the interview, Fey responded to a question about what she has learned from Alec Baldwin by explaining an incident that occurred while shooting season four's finale, set to air April 22:
"We're always pairing [Alec] with all of these random people. We did an episode in season four, which we just finished...there's a guy who's a custodian in the studio where we shoot. His name is Subas and we put him in the show a few times as a custodian. He's really natural and charming. And then, I guess what I learned from this is that maybe Alec doesn't actually watch the show after it's done. Because then Subas got a bigger story. We sort of did a Conan-Jay Leno parallel where the overnight janitor wanted the 11:30 janitor shift and it was like a janitor war. So we had one guy, who was an actor, and then we just used Subas again. And Alec pulled the director aside and was like, 'This guy is terrible! This guy is a terrible actor.' And we're like, 'Alec, he's the janitor. And he's been on the show four times."
Another piece of 30 Rock trivia revealed during the segment: Tina Fey auditioned a bunch of other actors for the role of Jack Donaghy before she "had the guts" to approach Baldwin. Now, who wants to guess which other actors tried out for the role of Liz Lemon's power-hungry superior?
ยท Tina Fey Admits She's a Sliding Doors Version of Liz Lemon [Vulture]