The subject of Fey's scar came up in a 2008 interview she did for Vanity Fair, alongside her husband, Jeff Richmond. When Fey was 5 years old and living in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, an attacker slashed her face. "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," Richmond explained.

Fey doesn't often speak about the incident, but in the interview she said it didn't affect her at the time — only once she entered show business. "I proceeded unaware of it," Fey said. "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, and it became a thing of 'Oh, I guess we should use this side' or whatever. Everybody's got a better side."

But Richmond felt that the scar shaped who Fey is as a person. "I think it really informs the way she thinks about her life," he offered. "When you have that kind of thing happen to you, that makes you scared of certain things, that makes you frightened of different things, your comedy comes out in a different kind of way, and it also makes you feel for people."