Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey make for a hilarious odd couple, as the duo demonstrated over their many seasons together on 30 Rock. But when Baldwin first met the comic genius, two years before they would share the screen on the show Fey created, he was sure they'd get along swimmingly. In fact, he immediately had a massive crush on his future co-star, as he reveals in a new Vanity Fair piece adapted from his new memoir, Nevertheless.
"When I first met Tina Fey — beautiful and brunette, smart and funny, by turns smug and diffident and completely uninterested in me or anything I had to say — I had the same reaction that I’m sure many men and women have: I fell in love," he writes. The fateful moment took place in Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michael's office; Baldwin was hosting SNL that week, and so he was crammed in the room with head writer Fey and a bunch of other producers.
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"When Lorne finished giving his notes after the dress rehearsal, I asked Marci Klein, who coordinated the talent, if Tina was single," Baldwin explains. "She pointed to a man sitting along the wall. Or maybe he was standing? This was Jeff Richmond, Tina’s husband. Jeff is diminutive. Tina describes him as 'travel-size.' When I saw him, I thought, What’s she doing with him? With his spools of curly brown hair and oversize eyes, Jeff resembles a Margaret Keane painting." A very cute and lucky-in-love Margaret Keane painting.
Baldwin jokes, though, that his feelings towards the couple shifted after he boarded 30 Rock, on which Richmond was the music supervisor and composer. "I changed that to 'What’s he doing with her?'" he writes, calling Fey's hubby Jeff "as loose and outgoing as Tina is cautious and dry." We're just glad the would-be awkward love triangle worked itself out and the (brilliant, long-running) show went on.
Nevertheless hits bookshelves and e-readers April 4.