Tina Fey Pulls Off The Relatable-Sex-Goddess Thing

“What I’ve come to realize is that when people say, ‘The thinking man’s whatever’ — there’s no such thing. The thinking man also wants to fuck Megan Fox,” Tina Fey tells Esquire, which, judging from its cover, disagrees.

(Not that they don’t think their readers want to fuck Megan Fox too.)

Fey acquiescing to the shoot and the story doesn’t mean she was up for all of the usual men’s magazine tricks:

“The idea of the photo shoot is something like my wild night out. The irony being that I don’t do that. I got an e-mail [from Esquire] with a list of the potential setups, and my e-mail back was like, Well, I need to decline being handcuffed to a bed. I won’t straddle anyone. I won’t make out with a cop. There are certain things, I totally get them as a premise. And they’re all good fun, and if I were a young single model, they would be appropriate, but, you know, I’m a mom. And my kid’s going to find this someday. I don’t want to be handcuffed to a bed in Esquire. What are you nuts? I’m not going to make out with a cop that I’m handcuffed to. I got to get my kid into kindergarten. I guess that’s more of a Montessori way of learning, when they handcuff you to things.”

Okay, so yes handcuffs with cop, no making out with said cop. And she gets to be the relatively responsible one in this shot:

Fey clearly knows what she’s doing by waxing self-deprecating about the shoot. She is clearly willing to do sexpot in Esquire and try on couture for Vogue, but she’s smart enough to know that she will never be the cookie cutter cover girl, and her fans like her better because she isn’t one. In fact, they like her first and foremost as she seems from her writing and her acting — sharp, funny, closer to “normal.” And so Fey deftly balances the glamourpuss photography by determinedly being “the real Tina” in her interviews.

As her fame grows, Fey walks a careful line of succeeding while still seeming like the underdog. She tells Esquire,

“I think my level of fame will drop back down. I think it’ll recede. In fact, I know it will. That’s life on planet earth. And I’m okay with that. Besides getting tables at restaurants and special treatment at the airport, what else is there?”

Well, for one thing, there’s also being the kind of undeniable cultural force that makes Esquire diversify beyond Fox and Angelina Jolie, and Vogue beyond Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett. And getting to do it more or less on your own terms.