7 Questions with Amy Poehler

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NBC has been plugging Amy Poehler’s new show in the breaks between all their big shows: Heroes, The Office, 30 Rock. And if you've seen one of these promos, you know the show is called Parks & Recreation and was created by the same people that brought you The Office. Poehler plays Leslie Knope, a mid-level bureaucrat in the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Indiana, trying to make a difference to her town with beautification projects as well as her career. There was speculation Parks was an Office spin-off but NBC Chairman Ben Silverman shot that down. It will, however, be a mockumentary style program (like The Office) and the similarities don't end there. Poehler's character is said to be somewhat vacuous, not unlike The Office's Michael Scott. Park & Recreation premieres April 9 on NBC.

Zimbio: Do you ever get up in the morning and think, “Tina Fey, Tina Fey, Tina Fey, Tina Fey, I'll show her"?
Amy Poehler: And then I turn around and I wake her up, and we have breakfast together. That's how that goes.

Zimbio: Of course you can play really wild characters, but you also do a great deadpan. What sort of Amy Poehler will we see on this show?
Amy Poehler: Thank you, I would like to show off something a little bit more specific and a little quieter. There's going to be episodes where I'll just read. I'm just going to sit and read, and the cameras are just going to roll.

Zimbio: So no rapping.
Amy Poehler: You know what? I cannot guarantee. I will not guarantee that that won't happen again, but I've learned my lesson.

Zimbio: Is Leslie oblivious to the way people feel about her?
Amy Poehler: Yes. She has not maybe the best sense of how she's coming off. Also, she kind of assumes that we're all in it together and that's not always the case. Most comedies, the lead character suffers from being not very self-aware. Leslie is an optimist, and she's really ambitious, and she's really kind of hoping that the place she is now is not the place she's going to stay. So she's kind of struggling to find her way in a "man's world" to try to make her mark, and along the way, she's deluded.

Zimbio: Are we supposed to like her?
Amy Poehler: Yeah, I think we're supposed to like her. I do think she decides she wants to run with the big boys, and you have to take the hits. I think you're going to find that it's going to be very easy to humiliate and be mean to me in the show. I think it's going to be very easy. It will make you feel good. You'll see people be mean to me. You'll be satisfied.

Zimbio: Do you have any experience with local government?
Amy Poehler: Both my parents were public school teachers. My dad was on the school committee, and we did a lot of passing out leaflets for town council meetings and selectmen and stuff like that. I kind of grew up around local politics, campaigned a lot for a gentleman named Dukakis, if anyone remembers him. Yes, Massachusetts. But I kind of grew up in that world and now the world of my parents watch town council meetings on their TV, and they sit and watch them and care, obviously, about what is next to them, what's being built. Are they going to put a prison where the muffin shop used to be? So that's always kind of been in my life.

Zimbio: Since all the political candidates did SNL, will you get the superstars of local government to cameo?
Amy Poehler: Yeah, whoever is the hot comptroller can come on. No, I think it's really not about any kind of agenda, just about the kind of minutiae of the slow and steady work of trying to figure out how to change small things, I think, is what's funny about the show.

Zimbio: Could your baby, the child of Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, be the funniest person in history?
Amy Poehler: That is terrible pressure for a three month old. I will not subject him to that pressure.

For more photos of Amy Poehler than you can click on, go here.

And here's the show's trailer: