Cover Story: A Whole New Playbook
BB: You were pretty involved in the promotion for the Silver Linings Playbook film. How did that happen, and when did things get intense for you?
MQ: It got intense for me as soon as I saw the film. In August, the Weinstein Company had me come down to Tribeca. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was on an audition that day. When I got home, I talked to David [O. Russell] and [producer] Bruce Cohen. When I told them I really enjoyed the film, they seemed wildly relieved. I had no idea everyone was stressing out about my reaction. I wrote a blog post about how I enjoyed it, and how, even though it was a little different from the book, I embraced the film. I went down to North Carolina with my parents on vacation the first week of September and I got a call from the Weinstein Company and they said, “Everybody here read your blog. Can we use it for publicity?” That’s when I realized that they were watching what I was doing online. You’re stupid if you think people aren’t watching. That was the moment I realized I was going to be included in the publicity. … I started traveling in October, doing media tours. I would go to a city and do media all day long. … It was fun, being chauffeured, staying in posh hotels, working all day long. Sometimes I was in a presidential suite and for hours would do a different interview every 15 minutes. I didn’t have any negative experience at all, just that there was so much of it. … Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what I said in the interview because I’d told the same story so many times.