Tina Fey Says She Inadvertently Saved Someone’s Life This Year

While joining Jimmy Fallon in-person for The Tonight Show, Tina Fey talked about buying her first car over quarantine, taking a trip outside of New York City with her family, and saving a man’s life on her brief vacation.

“I just hear something going ‘help,'” she recalled of her accidental heroism, saying she and her family weren’t sure if the cries for help were coming from a person or a bird. When they couldn’t tell who or what was making the noise, they called the police, who discovered it was a person whose kayak had flipped in the Hudson River.

“The cops take off and then we found out a couple of hours later that it was a guy who flipped a kayak in the Hudson and was floating,” she said. “They found him a mile north, in the river.”

“I saved a man’s life,” she said emphatically, sounding surprised herself. “He doesn’t know, but it was us.”

The takeaway she got from the experience: never kayak in the Hudson River. “That’s not a stream, that’s like a rat toilet,” she said.

Jimmy and Tina went on to talk about her upcoming Pixar movie Soul, set to hit Disney+ on Christmas. The film is already being praised for a variety of things, including the way it depicts the diversity of hair textures Black people have, rather than presenting hair as a monolith like many other animated films.