By DANIELLE GARRAND
ASSISTANT CULTURE EDITOR
In the upcoming film Admission, Tina Fey (“30 Rock”) plays Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan, who searches for the best and brightest students, but ends up finding romance with John Pressman, played by Paul Rudd (Our Idiot Brother) along the way.
Directed by Paul Weitz, this film features the worries of being accepted into the top schools in the country to which all college students can relate. With college as the key focal point of the film, viewers are prone to wonder what the stars’ experiences with academia have been. In a special pre-screening and press conference granted for The Fordham Ram, the film’s stars answered these questions and many more.
Both Fey and Rudd attended college, but seemed to remember it as an experience much different than students today know.
“I didn’t go through this before. I just bought the t-shirt and showed up,” Rudd joked.
He attended the University of Kansas and studied Jacobean Drama at the British American Drama Academy of Oxford, England. Similarly, regarding a comment about the many sections of the SAT Fey said, “ There are only three parts to the SAT now. I couldn’t even remember how many there were back then.”
Fey attended The University of Virginia where she studied playwriting and acting.
Fey also offered some advice about getting into the acting business for potential hopefuls, “Don’t go to New York or LA. You have a much better shot at getting something in a different city where everyone doesn’t go.” Fey got her start in the world-famous comedy and improv group Second City in Chicago.
For younger co-star Nat Wolff, who plays the gifted and somewhat strange Jeremiah Balakian, a boy that Fey meets on her high school tours, the topic of applying to schools is as fresh in his mind as last week. Wolff is a high school senior who just finished applying to college.
“Of course I was way more excited about the movie than applying to college. So, I would visit colleges in character. I really hit it off with the MIT guy, but that’s because he thought I was Jeremiah and really good at math and sciences. Too bad I’m not really good at math and sciences. He kept asking me questions about visiting again and I couldn’t tell him I had no idea what I was saying,” Wolff said.
Although Wolff isn’t getting into MIT anytime soon, he is planning to attend college in the fall. When asked about his new-found fame, he said that he was not very comfortable living with it in New York. Maybe he will follow in his older co-stars footsteps and trade in the city life for one of a country mouse next year.
Director Paul Weitz joked about his early experiences with college and grades as well.
“My doorman would save my report cards for me so they wouldn’t get to my parents. I used to change them, you know the ‘F’s’ to ‘A’s,’ the minuses to pluses. It was only a problem when I was applying to college and they had an inflated sense of what my grades were,” Weitz said. Despite his shenanigans, Weitz attended Wesleyan University.
Weitz also offered a bit of valuable information that is sometime overlooked by the GPA driven culture of colleges and the coveted acceptance letters. The director said, “ Personally, I don’t think it matters where you go to college. It is whom you meet when you’re there. Be your own judge. The biggest pitfall is giving the judgment over to others.” Admission, coming out March 22nd, should not be missed, and it is the thoughtful and hysterical cast that truly makes the experience seem like a real college admissions process.
