Tina Fey Tells Oprah She's Basically Retired, Mostly Means It

Tina Fey walked into a Weight Watchers arena event in Minneapolis in January 2020 and told Oprah Winfrey she was dead inside. She said it with a smile. She meant it as a compliment to domesticity. ‘I’m dead inside Oprah,’ she said. ‘I like my house. I like being inside my house.’ This is the version of Tina Fey that does not get covered enough: the one who is 49, deliberately slowing down, eating strawberries with frozen Cool Whip, and genuinely, stubbornly content about it.

The setting is a little surreal. Oprah is doing a live wellness tour for WW, formerly Weight Watchers, and Fey is one of her guest ‘visionaries,’ which is a word that does a lot of heavy lifting when the conversation eventually arrives at banana-split substitutes. But the format works in Fey’s favor. She is relaxed in a way that a traditional press junket would not allow. No movie to promote, no scandal to manage. Just a woman in her late forties sitting with someone she has genuinely idolized since high school, eating Jiffy Pop in front of the TV.

The Cortisol Years

The most useful thing Fey says is about 30 Rock, and she does not frame it as a triumph. She describes the period when she was running the show, shooting an Oprah cameo, preparing to play Sarah Palin for the first time on SNL, and baking a birthday cake for a three-year-old who would not remember it, all on the same weekend. Her word for how that felt is not ‘exhilarating.’ It is cortisol. Specifically, a tightness in the chest, front and back, that she now recognizes as a kind of damage.

There would be days where I’m like I feel it eating my heart like a cortisol, the cortisol is burning away my heart.

She does not say this bitterly. She says it the way someone says it when they are far enough away to find it almost funny, and close enough to mean it. The reboot she keeps referencing is not a new project. It is the decision to stop. She tells Oprah she keeps telling her husband she’s retired. He keeps correcting her. She keeps saying it anyway.

What She Actually Learned From Weight Watchers

Fey has been a WW lifetime member since her late twenties, when she joined with comedian Paula Pell at a meeting above a jewelry store on 86th and Broadway. She lost 30 pounds. She says it ‘kind of changed my career a little bit’ because suddenly she could be on television, and then immediately clocks how grim that sounds. ‘Which is terrible,’ she says, before landing on: ‘Also, like, okay, it worked out.’ The self-awareness is doing real work there.

I lost like 30 pounds that has mostly stayed off and in many ways kind of changed my career a little bit now it was like oh okay maybe now you can be on TV which is terrible.

She also talks about using the WW Connect app not to track food but to decompress. When she feels the urge to fire back at someone on Twitter, she goes on Connect instead and spends fifteen minutes saying encouraging things to strangers posting their meals and milestones. She does it anonymously. She has three followers. ‘That’s exactly how I want it,’ she says. For someone who made a career out of public performance, there is something almost moving about that.

On Jokes, Diversity, and Not Hurting Anyone

Oprah asks whether anything is off-limits comedically and Fey gives the only honest answer: technically no, but the internet broke the room. A joke that worked for a specific audience now lands in front of everyone simultaneously, including people it was not for and people it harms. She does not pretend this is easy to navigate. Her solution, for herself and her peers, is less a principle than a project: figure out how to make comedy without hurting anyone, and make it more inclusive while you’re at it.

I don’t think there’s any topic that I wouldn’t want to hear what Chris Rock had to say about it right now. I was like I would feel safe in his thoughtfulness and his skills.

She is clearer on the diversity question. More kinds of people in the writers room makes better work, full stop. ‘You don’t want to be a bunch of Caucasian people trying to guess what’s okay for a Latino person,’ she says. ‘How about just have some Latino people in the room.’ It is not a radical statement in 2020, but Fey has been making the argument through hiring decisions since at least 30 Rock, so she earns the right to say it plainly.

The most Tina Fey moment of the whole conversation is when Oprah asks what excites her most right now and Fey pauses, genuinely considers the question, and says she wants to be an old lady bustling down a Manhattan street yelling at people at 85. That’s the vision. That’s the whole thing. She is not waiting for the next big idea. She is waiting to feel ready to want one. For someone who spent years running on cortisol, that sounds less like giving up and more like finally getting it right.