I know I’m not the only one who never really noticed Tina Fey’s scar until someone pointed it out to me. But most people seem to be a little more observant than I was, and speculation has run high about the origin of her scar since she first appeared on Saturday Night Live. As it turns out, the story is somehow more bizarre than I could have imagined. According to recent reports:

The 38-year-old comedienne was attacked by a stranger in a violent slashing incident when she was five.

“It was in, like, the front yard of her house, and somebody who just came up, and she just thought somebody marked her with a pen,” Fey’s husband, Jeff Richmond, says in an interview with Vanity Fair.

“That scar was fascinating to me,” Richmond says. “This is somebody who, no matter what it was, has gone through something. And I think it really informs the way she thinks about her life.”

According to the website Skinema.com, which is one of those disturbing special-interest websites that was designed in 1996 and hasn’t been revamped since, lots of actors and actresses have scars. Among the most notable are Harrison Ford, who is well-known for his distinctive chin mark (from a car accident, although in the Indiana Jones films he got it from a whip crack), and Elizabeth Taylor, who was trached during a bout with double pneumonia, leading to a prominent neck scar.

But one they left out is James Marsters, most famous for his role as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He has a very visible scar on his eyebrow from an attempted mugging in New York - apparently, he was punched with some brass knuckles. (I have a similar scar from when my mother accidentally ran into me while holding a hot pan. Boy, do I not miss being waist-high to an adult.) But the more interesting one is on his leg, where he “shredded” it on a sprinkler key as a child. He couldn’t walk on it for a year, and now has a large scar from the resultant skin graft.

Another one they left out: Joaquin Phoenix, whose lip scar is not from a harelip as you might imagine. He was just born with it. It’s strange to me that the site, which has at least been updated since the election, doesn’t contain any references to Phoenix - or, in their section on scarred villains, Ralph Fiennes’ character in Red Dragon. (They do refer to Mason Verger in Hannibal, despite the fact that “facial scarring” is about the mildest possible term for having your face eaten off by dogs.)

How do I know that it’s been updated since the election? Because of a link to this article on their blog, which, as kind of a tone as it might have, is just a nice way of saying that Obama is old as heck.

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