By CHRIS SURPRENANT
Arts Editor
As many of college students know all too well, the college admission process is both a personal and public nightmare. The tests, the interviews, and the essays contribute to an overall feeling of uneasiness in a high school senior. Admission stars Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, along with co-star Nat Wolff and director Paul Weitz sat down with college journalists to talk about the dreaded process their film tackles, as well as their own academic experiences.
In Admission, Wolff stars as Jeremiah Balakian, an incredibly intelligent, socially awkward high school student hoping to get into Princeton. He
is encouraged to apply by John Pressman (Rudd), overseer of his alternative high school. To help Jeremiah’s chances, he enlists the help of his former classmate Portia Nathan (Fey), an emotionally drained admissions officer at the institution.
Wolff, like his gifted fictional counterpart, is also in the process of applying to college. “It was interesting because I was going through the exact same thing, but I was way more excited about doing the movie that I was about college,” he said.
Like many his age, he has been visiting colleges frequently to decide the best fit for him. Of course, doing a film, it gave him a unique opportunity to do some character research when attending college fairs.
“I went in character and went into all these schools, pretending to be this math and science genius, and I really hit it off with the MIT guy. They still call me twice a week, and I tell them, you know, I’m not really good at math and science…you don’t want me in your school,” he joked.
Being the youngest on set, Wolff took his fair share of ribbing from his older co-stars. “I remember Tina announced my SAT scores to the crew, but not my math scores! Just the other two.”
Age, however, doesn’t always have its perks. “I was appalled, I was like, there’s three parts to the SAT now? There were only two parts when I took them,” Fey quipped.
“I never took the SAT. No, I took the ACT. I mean in the Midwest, we never took the SAT. I didn’t apply to colleges, I didn’t, you know, go through all of this,” said Rudd.
“You just showed up at campus?” Fey asked.
“I just showed up. I did, I bought the shirt, and was like, okay, this is the high school I go to and this is the college I go to,” Rudd joked.
Rudd attended the University of Kansas and began studying theater there. In order to get into the program, he was required to do the standard two contrasting monologues.
“One of them was a poem from book that I had just found. It was by a guy who had just won a poetry competition, about how one guy was working in an auto factory, or a fast-food restaurant. I had never seen such brilliance!”
Director Paul Weitz reflected on his own school experiences, recalling the days in high school when he would hide his report cards from his parents and how, “Anything with a minus sign I’d change to a plus.”
However, his ruse eventually caught up to him when it was time to get serious about applying to college.
“They had a very inflated sense of what my grades were going into the college application process. My parents were like, ‘He’s going to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale’ and the counselor was like, ‘I don’t think he has the grades for that.’”
Good grades or not, the entire cast was able to set foot on Princeton University’s campus while filming. One of Fey’s favorite scenes was one of the most emotionally significant for her character, Portia.
“It’s the scene where I’m like in tears and they are singing their sunny, collegiate a cappella song. They sounded so good.”
Admission will be Fey’s first project since the end of her long-running NBC sitcom 30 Rock.
“It’s a very bittersweet ending, but just the fact that we knew it was ending was such a great thing that we weren’t just cancelled, but that we were able to say to the network, ‘Can you just do these last few episodes and be done?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, because your show is freaking expensive.’ So it was nice, everyone got to say goodbye. So it’s okay. We’re still literally moving our junk out of the offices and Girls is moving in” she joked.
In a room filled with college kids, advice for post-graduation plans was inevitable.
For those who hope to go into comedy, Fey said, “I usually tell them to not go to Los Angeles right away, because I feel like you could go to Chicago, and there’s funny stuff in New York too. You can just be on your feet more and do more stuff, even if you’re a writer. You can write a non-equity play in Chicago before you throw yourself wholeheartedly into the really business end of the business.”
Weitz, director of the college comedy American Pie, had some of the most universal advice to offer.
“Whether you go to community college or a top-ranked school, you can come out of a great school being undereducated in the most important things in your life. Or, you can go to community college and be really affected by somebody. My one bit of advice would be to be your own judge. One of the big pitfalls in life is giving over judgment to critics or to the box office, to someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t give a damn about you. But you know whether you worked hard or not.”
