Then-newcomer Tina Fey was ordered to have a word with Saturday Night Live guest host Sylvester Stallone over his words ― he wasn’t pronouncing them clearly enough.
Reminiscing in a recent instalment of SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, Tina described her awkward debut as a writer in 1997.
The Rocky star had played up verbal mannerisms in his movies, and perhaps they were getting in the way of a sketch for the ’97 season premiere.
“I think possibly my first week as a writer, Sylvester Stallone [hosted] and a note came back that was, ‘Tell him he needs to enunciate more. We can’t understand him’. And then the writer that I was working with, he was more experienced, and he’s like ‘OK, you go do it,’” Tina recalled, as reported by People.
“But it’s a great trial by fire,” she continued. “Mr. Stallone was very nice about it. Clearly not the first time in his life he had received that note.”
Tina had previously dished on the confrontation in her memoir Bossypants, specifying that the order for Sly to articulate better actually came from producer Lorne Michaels.
“During the dress rehearsal, Lorne gave us the note that he couldn’t understand Stallone in the sketch, and we should ask him to enunciate more,” Tina wrote, per CheatSheet.
“I stood nervously outside the host’s dressing room with [fellow writer] Scott Wainio. He had been there a year already, so I figured he’d know what to do. Scott’s experience level was evident when he looked at me and shrugged. ‘You tell him.’”
“My trademark obedience kicked in and I found myself knocking on the door and being ushered in,” she continued. “Judge Dredd himself was on the couch in an undershirt, smoking another cigar. He looked up at me. I muttered, ‘In the Rita sketch, you were a little hard to understand. Can you just enunciate a little more?’”
Fey could have come off as a mean girl – but Sly apparently obliged.
