Considering how long Tina Fey and Paul Rudd have been making people laugh, you would think they would have worked together by now, but somehow they’ve been circling around each other for years, working with many of the same people but never actually working together.
Fortunately, that situation has now been rectified with Admission, adapted from the book by Jean Hanff Korelitz and directed by Paul Weitz (About a Boy, In Good Company), in which Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton University who finds herself questioning her strict policies when she meets John Pressman (Rudd), the director of an alternative New Hampshire high school who is convinced one of his students (Nat Wolff) may be the son that Portia gave up for adoption 18 years earlier.
The movie is funny and romantic and on par with some of Weitz’s popular earlier films but more than anything, it shows that putting Fey and Run on screen together may have been the filmmaker’s smartest casting move. Of course that’s not to take away from the likes of Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn, Michael Sheen or the rest of the cast who all bring something to the movie.
ComingSoon.net spoke with Fey and Rudd a few weeks back at the New York junket, which happened to take place shortly after the series finale of Fey’s long-running show “30 Rock.”
In the video interview below, Fey told us why she decided to fit this movie into her busy schedule while Rudd talked about working with Fey compared to some of his other comedy leading ladies he’s worked with over the years. Fey talked about whether she needed to do research into Princeton admissions and Rudd talked about some of his own challenges in creating the role. Fey talked about having so many writers on set and how she differentiated Portia from her “30 Rock” character Liz Lemon and Rudd told us why he’s never appeared on the show.
