What Tina Fey really thinks of Sarah Palin

last updated 8 January 2015

Tina Fey doesn’t hate Sarah Palin. People assume the comic actress did her famous sendup of the former vice presidential candidate for Saturday Night Live to hold Palin up to ridicule, but Fey says there was no political vendetta. “The weird thing is,” she tells Jonathan Van Meter in Vogue, “when Darrell Hammond or Will Ferrell or Dana Carvey did an impersonation of a president, no one assumed it was personal. But because Sarah Palin and I are both women and people think women are meaner to each other, everyone assumed it was personal.” Fey says her parents were both Republicans, and she considers herself an independent. “The partisan nature of politics continues to appall me. I’m almost paralyzed by my inability to see things in black and white.”

She was startled when her Palin impressions prompted a flood of angry mail and threats. “There are people who hate me now because of that. And I encountered a lot of hard-core Democrats who are just as rabid and hateful. It was scary to be in that world of politics.” She was so unnerved, in fact, that she recently bought a house in the country and won’t say where it is. “I don’t want anyone to come there and try to kill me.”