How did Tina Fey get the scar on her face? It happened in a very traumatic incident when she was just a 5-year-old little girl. She was playing in her first yard by herself when a stranger came out of nowhere, slashed her cheek for no reason, and ran away. Tina Fey thought that somebody had marked her with a pen. She does not like talking about her scar much.
Tina Fey is easily one of the most talented comedians and actresses in Hollywood. She was the youngest person to be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and I think that tells everything you need to know about her. She was brilliant as a head writer and a performer in the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live and she gave us the perfect satirical show loosely based on her time working on SNL called 30 Rock and the iconic ultimate chick flick Mean Girls.
She is simply hilarious and can make jokes about everything just on the spot. Did you know she even made jokes about the scar on her face as well, which, by the way, has a traumatic history? Yeah, I think her brain functions extraordinarily because her getting that mark from an assault kind of brought her personality out more than it traumatized her and made her a recluse. So, how did Tina Fey get her scar? Well, let’s find out!
You might also like the intriguing stories of Jay Blades’ gold teeth and Harry Styles’ chin scar.
How Did Tina Fey Get Her Scar? What Happened To Her Face?
Did you know that Tina Fey has a profile preference? She is mostly filmed from her right side only and she does not insist on it due to vanity or something. It’s because she is conscious of the scar on her face when she’s in front of the cameras. That’s pretty much the only time she thinks about it, she said. She has done a great job of erasing the memories of how she got that mark and not letting it affect her.
Tina Fey has a faint scar on the left side of her face.
Image Source: Vanity Fair
As for how she got that mark on her face, it happened in a very traumatic incident when she was a child. She initially didn’t choose to share the history of the faint thin scar that lines the left side of her face but as she rose in terms of popularity, more people took interest in that mark above her chin. She probably was avoiding talking about that because she didn’t want to glorify it. In a 2008 interview with Vanity Fair, she said,
It’s impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it.
But Tina Fey didn’t hold on to that incident by herself for much longer and eventually ended up sharing the story about what happened to her when she got that scar. So, what happened when she was just a 5-year-old little girl was that she was just playing in the front yard of her Upper Darby, Penn., by herself minding her own business when all of a sudden, she was approached by a stranger who, for no reason, just violently slashed her cheek and ran away.
The 30 Rock star was attacked by a complete stranger out of nowhere and cut across her cheek which left her with that thin scar on her face that extended from her left cheek to just above her chin. Initially, she had no idea of what had happened to her. She just thought that somebody had marked her with a pen. Tina Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond explained,
It was in, like, the front yard of her house, and somebody who just came up, and she just thought somebody marked her with a pen.
Maybe because she was partly unaware of that incident, she was able to keep it from affecting her childhood. She didn’t fully understand how she got that scar on her face and look at its silver lining, she was not much traumatized by the childhood attack she went through.
I proceeded unaware of it. I was a very confident little kid. It’s really almost like I’m kind of able to forget about it, until I was on-camera.
What Does Tina Fey Say About Her Scar In Her Book?
Anyway, that’s all we know about the whole thing because Tina Fey only talked about that scar on her face that one time. You would think she would go into detail about the incident in her memoir but no, even in her book Bossypants, she mentioned that faint mark but not to share it’s history but to joke about it. Everything relating to it was light-hearted in the book.
Tina Fey said that she didn’t want people to feel sorry for how she got that scar.
Image Source: NBC
The Emmy winner talked about being able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask about her scar and how if they ask.
I’ve always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: ‘Did a cat scratch you?’ God bless. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, “Did they ever catch the Black guy that did that to you?” Hmmm. It was not a Black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was.
Tina Fey also mentioned that she didn’t want people’s sympathy for what happened to her when she was a child and got that scar on her face. She also said that she became more recognized after the childhood attack and people were kinder to her because she was the girl who got violently slashed. The treatment she received made her feel special.
My scar was a miniature form of celebrity. Kids knew who I was because of it. Lots of people liked to claim they were there when it happened. ‘I was there.’ ‘I saw it.’ ‘Crazy Mike did it!’ Adults were kind to me because of it. Aunts and family friends gave me Easter candy and oversize Hershey’s Kisses long after I was too old for presents. I was made to feel special.
Tina Fey felt that she was some sort of genius or something because of how people treated her and as a result of that, instead of her being traumatized by the history of her scar, she instead developed more confidence. I think it’s a great thing that she didn’t end up anti-social and a recluse after the horrific accident.
What should have shut me down and made me feel ‘less than’ ended up giving me an inflated sense of self. It wasn’t until years later, maybe not until I was writing this book, that I realized people weren’t making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius; they were making a fuss over me to compensate for my being slashed.
