‘Foxtrot’ gets Fey, Robbie up close to war in Afghanistan
They’re strong women who share a foxhole, onscreen and off
NEW YORK Before she became one of comedy’s reigning queens, Tina Fey worked the 9-to-5 grind like the rest of us. Just out of college and studying improv at Second City, she manned the front desk at a Chicago-area YMCA to pay the bills.
“For the first year, you’re like, ‘I got a desk! I go to lunch for 40 minutes!’ ” says Fey, who plays a fish-out-of-water war correspondent in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (in theaters Friday). “Then you’re like: ‘Wait a minute, I don’t want to do this.’ ”
That said, being cubicle-bound has its upsides. “People at an office work 40 hours a week and we’d rather work 70, literally in mud,” Fey adds with a smile. “Like, ‘Yeah, we’re geniuses! We beat the system!’ ”
Based on journalist Kim Bark
er’s 2011 memoir The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghani
stan and Pakistan, the movie follows a New York-based cable news writer (played by Fey). Bored with her humdrum life and boyfriend (Josh Charles), she impulsively accepts a position as an on-air reporter in Afghanistan. Partying at brothels and karaoke bars when she’s not dodging bullets and interviewing Afghan warlords, Kim overcomes culture shock and finds comfort in the chaos — which makes it difficult to eventually leave her adrenaline-fueled life behind.
Weeks after a New York Times review of Taliban compared Kim to a “Tina Fey character,” the book caught the attention of the
Saturday Night Live veteran, who quickly optioned movie rights. It’s rare, says Fey, 45, “to find stories about women that aren’t ‘I work at a magazine!’ Where they’re really doing something unusual and yet it’s something where I felt it was plausible that I could play this person. Kim’s real stories were so crazy and funny, but shocking and compelling.”
Whiskey is co-produced by Fey and SNL’s Lorne Michaels, with a script by her 30 Rock co-creator Robert Carlock, who changed Kim’s profession from a print to TV reporter and added characters such as Tanya (Margot Robbie), Kim’s shrewd, sexy colleague who shows her the ropes in Kabul.
“I’m always attracted to strong characters,” says Robbie, 25. “That doesn’t mean they have to be having fight scenes, necessarily, but having strong opinions and confidence in what they think.”
True to Fey’s brand of unapologetic feminism, Kim and Tanya support each other. There are no catfights over guys, and any squabbles they have are careerdriven.
“It was important to me that it wasn’t just a knee-jerk rivalry, be- cause that’s not my experience,” Fey says. “I’ve definitely worked in places where it’s a lot of dudes and very few women. The women stick together, so I wanted that to feel truthful.”
Although Whiskey takes many liberties with her story, Barker, 45, says its depiction of female friendship rings true. “(You form) close friendships that are probably difficult to develop in the civilian world, because you’re thrown into this crucible together and the only people who understand what it’s like are the other folks who are there. Yeah, we were competitive over stories to a certain extent, but we would also help each other.”