Fey dodged a lot of obstacles while shooting the film
In the biopic-casting lottery, Kim Barker may have won the jackpot.
Just after publishing her 2011 memoir The Taliban Shuffle, about her five-year stint reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Chicago Tribune, she got the call that Tina Fey wanted to play her in a film adaptation.
“She’s one of the smartest, funniest women in Hollywood, so I wasn’t going to complain at all,” says Barker, 45, now a metro reporter for The New York Times. “She’s a little short” — Fey is 5foot-4, Barker is 5-foot-10 — “but I was happy.”
She met Fey only once over lunch before shooting started on Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (in theaters Friday), whose title is a play on the military alphabet. Familiar with her 30 Rock and
Saturday Night Live personas, Barker was nicely surprised by how serious yet down to earth the comedian was.
“She asked me if I was ever scared about going into Afghanistan and what things were like,” Barker says. “We also talked about high heels and how we both had a hatred of them. She liked the wardrobe for this particular film because it didn’t involve any — it’s pretty Eddie Bauer.”
Fey shares admiration for Barker, who “put up with a lot of crazy nonsense” from sexist locals while living and working in Kabul, the actress says.
“Kim was talking about how you don’t want to complain or call it out, because you don’t want to get pulled and sent home,” says Fey, 45, who recalls a section in the book when a group of guys grab Barker’s butt while she’s trying to cover a story. “She just turned around and punched one of them in the face.”
Fey didn’t pull punches shoot- ing the darkly comic, action-heavy
Whiskey, which filmed in New Mexico last year and co-stars Margot Robbie (the upcoming Suicide
Squad). Robbie plays the fictional Tanya Vanderpoel, a top-notch TV journalist who is on the front lines when a car bomb goes off midway through the movie (“It was the biggest explosion I’ve ever seen on a set,” Robbie says).
As Kim, Fey checked off firsts such as firing guns and flying in a helicopter — not to mention trying to navigate a crowded street while wearing a burqa.
“It made me really glad to be born here,” Fey says. “It made me real mad, really quickly. You can’t see if you’re going to trip over it, and in one ( burqa), there’s no sleeves, so your arms are almost incapacitated. It would be very hard to spend an entire day out and about in that getup.”
Although neither actress has dropped everything to work in a war zone like Barker, Robbie, 25, is a bit of a daredevil offscreen. The actress recalls a petrifying moment while she was swimming with hammerhead sharks off Costa Rica last year when “a 4-meter tiger shark swam right at me. Everyone was like, ‘Ah, she’s about to die!’ But I looked down and it swam between my feet. I actually thought it was a whale, it was so fat.”
Fey points to her co-star, shrugging: “I’ve never done anything like that.”
“You’ve given birth,” Robbie counters with a laugh. “That’s going to be one of the most terrifying things I’ll ever do.”