Tina Fey didn’t know she'd already worked with Mean Girls star Bebe Wood on 30 Rock

The limit does not exist when it comes to Tina Fey’s love for Bebe Wood.

The Mean Girls writer tells EW that finding an actress to portray Gretchen Wieners in the new movie musical was one of the most difficult parts of the casting process — and she was touched to discover that her favorite performer for the part had already worked with her. 

Fey says that Gretchen, the volatile Plastic played by Lacey Chabert in the original film, was the last major role to cast for the new movie, and the abundance of talent in the auditioning process made the decision tough. "We saw a lot of wonderful actors," she says. "But there is a kind of fragility and vulnerability to Gretchen. She has to have all this intelligence, but also this kind of vibrating fragility at the same time."

Fey cleared her schedule to find a suitable Gretchen. "There was a day where I just was saying, 'You know what? All these women we're seeing are super talented on their own, but they don't feel quite right in the part. I'm going to take two days and watch every single tape that we have,'" Fey recalls. "And in that path of going through every single tape, I came across Bebe, and her audition tape was just so beautiful and heart-wrenching. And I said, this is it."

After she’d made up her mind about Wood, Fey made a surprising discovery. "When I went to IMDb to see how experienced she was, I was very moved to find that I had picked a tape of Bebe once many years before when she was 10, she was in an episode of 30 Rock," she says. "She looks completely different. I didn't recognize her at all. And I was like, 'Wow, I really like this actress every time I see her.'"

Wood played Cat, a young girl who inspires Fey's Liz Lemon to give motherhood another shot in the season 6 episode "Murphy Brown Lied to Us."

Fey may not have remembered her prior experience with Wood, but the young actor, who also starred on Love, Victor, will never forget her time on 30 Rock: it was one of her earliest acting gigs. "I logged onto the Zoom and the first person that I saw was Tina," Wood tells EW of the audition process for Mean Girls. "And that was a really special experience because she and I worked together a little over 10 years ago. She was my very first scene partner basically as a professional actor on 30 Rock. So it was really surreal to have that full circle moment. It was really, really special."

Wood says that the experience was so powerful that she would have been happy even if she hadn’t gotten the part. "I logged off the Zoom after I did the scene and I called my mom, and I was like, 'I don't even care what happens. That was just such a special moment. I'm so happy that this happened.' Just an amazing moment to cherish."

Mean Girls is now playing in theaters. Watch EW's Around the Table with the cast above.

Additional reporting by Sam Highfill.

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