Tina Fey reveals the ‘Mean Girls’ character she relates to: 'I talked a lot of smack'

Tina Fey may have pulled from her own experience while writing “Mean Girls."

Ahead of the release of her newly revised film, which serves as the musical pairing to the popular 2004 hit, the 53-year-old comedian opened up about her own high school experience on TODAY Jan. 10.

“I was definitely kind of a theater geek, an absolute dork,” she told Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb. “I did not take my brother to my prom, I will draw the line there ... I just was a good student.”

There's one "Mean Girls" character in particular whom Fey said she most closely identifies with: Janice.

“I do think I talked a lot of smack about people that I thought that I was the victim in every situation, and really I was a monster,” she said.

The musical rendition of "Mean Girls" hit Broadway in 2017, but had to shut down during the pandemic.

“I wanted more people to see what we had made,” Fey told TODAY. “And then this opportunity (arose) to take our favorite parts of the Broadway musical and then put it back into cinematic form.”

Fey clarified, however, that the new release doesn’t feel like a “filmed Broadway show,” rather, she said the shooting more closely resembles a music video. The writer added that it feels “very fresh.”

Fey, who will be reprising her role as Ms. Norbury, a math teacher at North Shore High School, also shared the conversations she had with her kids while making the script for the musical film.

"Every now and then I would kind of run stuff by them and be like, 'Should the burn book still be this book or should it be a website?'" she recalled. "'What's cool now? PDFs, right?'"

When it came to casting heartthrob Aaron Samuels, Fey said her children and their friends played a role in selecting Christopher Briney.

"I was putting my phone up to the Zoom showing like 12 of my daughter's friends, like, 'This guy?'" she said of a final casting call. "And it was like a, 'Yes!!' a violent 'yes.'"

Fey shares two daughters, Alice and Penelope, with husband Jeff Richmond, an Emmy-winning composer and producer.

"Mean Girls," the musical movie, hits theaters Jan. 12.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com