Tina Fey admitted she wasn’t the best wingman to her friend Amy Poehler, who she said was caught in the crossfire as she “embarrassed” herself in front of another celebrity.
Fey was trying to hook Poehler up when things went awry, she explained during a Four Seasons cast interview with Netflix to promote the comedy’s second season on the streamer.
The group was instructed to hold up a red or green flag based on the scenarios on the cue cards they were given, and Fey volunteered the anecdote when she read aloud, “Your married friend is pushing you to hook up with the hottie you met on vacation.”
After the other cast member waved their green flags, Fey admitted, “I was guilty of this once.”
“I had a friend who was single,” she continued, without naming Poehler. Fans remember that Fey previously revealed the friend to be Poehler during a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I was trying to like nudge her toward this other famous person,” she continued, “We’re at like an award show, and I was like, ‘Hey, I think he’s down to clown,’ whatever.”
Poehler was married to fellow comedian Will Arnett, with whom she shares two sons, from 2003 to 2012. Her last public romance at the time was with Nick Kroll, from 2013 to 2015. Fey said she’d had a few too many when she was trying to help Poehler get back out there.
“I was getting more drunk myself, and I realized over the course of the night I was going to this famous actor being like, ‘You should keep hanging out with us,’ unsolicited on my friend’s behalf,” she said, mimicking her flirty, slurred speech. “But as the night wore on, I was like, ‘Oh, he thought it was me! And I was like, embarrassed,” she continued, before adding, “Sorry, James Marsden! It was not on my behalf.”
Fey and Poehler recalled how it went down at the Netflix Is a Joke Festival in 2022: “You were newly single, and I knew he was newly single,” Fey told Poehler at the time. Marsden played one of Fey’s love interests on 30 Rock.
“I was walking out, and I was like, ‘Jimmy, you should come to our afterparty.’ He was like, ‘Oh, maybe I will,’ and I was like, ‘No, you should definitely come to our afterparty.’ I was drunk.”
She concluded, “Then he was like, ‘I’m going to take off.’ I realized in my drunkenness that he thinks I was trying to f--- him, and I’m a married lady, and he’s a gentleman. I wasn’t.”
Poehler has been dating former New York Times Magazine editor Joel Lovell since 2024.
