Few things are more irritating to read than a celebrity profile, because fawning is best small doses, and there are only so many ways to say "she laughed, while delicately piercing a leaf of endive."
So in order to change things up a bit, Esquire magazine, home of the irritating celebrity profile, gave a celebrity (Halle Berry) the opportunity to write a profile of a writer (Tom Chiarella) for their May issue instead. The result? Halle Berry seamlessly works the title of her upcoming movie (A Perfect Stranger aka IM Can Kill You) into the article no fewer than 22 times.
It's not online yet, but below is a small sample, with my emphasis added:
My Date With A Perfect Stranger
I entered the restaurant looking for the perfect stranger who would write this last and forgettable piece, and I was shocked to find that he looked nothing like I had suspected. Instead of being a freakish monster out to get me, he was a soft teddy-bear type with shaggy hair and an easy smile and the very normal name of Tom. Due to my extreme paranoia, I immediately thought it sneaky of the magazine to send a totally harmless perfect stranger to do its dirty work.
We sat down and started with the normal blah, blah, blah that most perfect strangers start conversations with, and then suddenly, after about 10 minutes, I realized the interview has begun but Tom, the perfect stranger, has not taken one note or pulled out a tape recorder. At that moment, I smiled on the inside: Either Tom was as dumb as paint, or Tom was going to be my best interview ever. Since this was my last interview, I decided to seek revenge preemptively on this perfect stranger and ask him all the annoying kinds of questions that I had suffered through for so many years.
It goes on like that, but with at least fourteen more uses of "perfect stranger" expertly folded into the prose.
Well played, Halle Berry. Still, judging by the previews, you should have been working the phrase "It's like The Net, but worse, if that's possible" into the article.