Tina Fey Was Forced to Tell Sylvester Stallone to 'Annunciate More' in Her Very First Week at SNL: 'Trial by Fire'

Tina Fey recalls the rocky start to her time in the Saturday night live.

Appearing in SNL50: Behind Saturday Nightnew Peacock’s four-episode docu-series looking back on the late-night show’s past, the writer-turned-star recalls being surprised by the attitude around rewriting.

Fey admits that the sketch show is partly driven by competition.

“Although everyone is on SNL work together to do one thing, but no. It is built on competition. It’s made for like, ‘See you at the table,'” she says.

“I have to say, as a head writer, I came from Chicago and I was ready to fight anybody, but the rewriting tables were tough. They were grumpy,” she recalls of her time behind the scenes, starting in 1997.

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Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon in ‘Weekend Update’ on ‘SNL’ in 2001.

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“People would take the show synopsis and just go sketch by sketch and make fun of it, like the title and make fun of it, stupid, stupid, stupid. You’d walk out of the room fully aware that that writers room was s— on it until you were either, and it was somehow like that.”

Fey adds, “I don’t know if it’s the same anymore, and if it’s not, maybe it should become a little bit more.”

Laughing, she admits, “I think that’s good.”

That was not the only challenge when you are a beginner in SNL for Fey, however. Her early days presented her with another difficult task: to set Sylvester Stallone straight.

Sylvester Stallone in ‘Rocky’ from 1976. United Artists / Getty Images

“I think maybe my first week as a writer, Sylvester Stallone [hosted] and a message came back which read: ‘Tell him he must say something else. We cannot understand him.’ And then the writer I was working with, he was more experienced, and he said, ‘Okay, go for it.’ ”

“But it’s a big trial by fire,” says Fey. “Mr. Stallone was very gracious about it. It’s obviously not the first time he’s gotten that message.” Fey joined the cast of the series in 2000 and left in 2006. She has since returned to host the series six times, making her a member of the series’ Five-Timers Club.

Learn more about the history of the late-night staple by watching SNL50: Behind Saturday Nightnow streaming on Peacock.

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Source: HIS Education