Tina Fey on whether both Mean Girls movies share a universe

Ms. Norbury and Principal Duvall have worked at North Shore High for a while.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Mean Girls.

Tina Fey didn't plan on reprising her role as Ms. Norbury in the new Mean Girls musical movie. And yet, her decision to once again don that polka dot top opens up a number of possibilities for the Mean Girls universe.

"Paramount was like, 'We would like you to [play Ms. Norbury],' and I could get my head around doing it if Tim [Meadows] would do it too," Tina Fey tells EW. "Because my best friend's a teacher and teachers are there a long time. So I could get my head around the idea that we would still be there without breaking the universe and that we'd see these same patterns happening in front of us...and not look too closely at the fact that the kids have the same names."

Not only did Meadows return as Principal Duvall, but in this film, it's revealed that he and Ms. Norbury are married. "They just got married at some point," Fey says. "And Tim went to graduate school at some point, and he's still in a cast. That joke is 90 percent just to amuse my old 30 Rock writing partner, Robert Carlock. After the first movie came out, he used to tease us both, 'Your characters really are in love.' So that joke is mostly for him."

Tina Fey plays Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls from Paramount Pictures
Tina Fey in 'Mean Girls'.

Jojo Whilden/Paramount

But if those characters are still at North Shore High and have had time to get married, does that mean this is the same school that Lindsay Lohan's Cady once attended? And speaking of, during Lohan's cameo as the Mathlete competition moderator, she has a line where, when the competition results in a tie, she says, "This has only ever happened once before." So does that mean we're still in the same universe and Lohan is, in fact, still playing Cady?

"I wouldn't look at it with a microscope. It doesn't entirely make sense, but it's a multiverse. That's what it is. Yeah, it's a Spider-Man," Fey says jokingly. " I don't really know those movies, so I don't know if what I'm saying applies."

Somewhere in Illinois, we hope a local paper is doing a deep investigation into how two young women named Regina George were both hit by a bus at the same school.

Mean Girls is in theaters now. 

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