She Brings a Dinosaur to Hollywood Press Junkets — And A-List Celebrities Love It

08 Apr She Brings a Dinosaur to Hollywood Press Junkets — And A-List Celebrities Love It

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She Brings a Dinosaur to Hollywood Press Junkets — And A-List Celebrities Love It

How Dallas entertainment host Danielle Hawthorne built a career interviewing the biggest names in Hollywood, then turned her storytelling skills into a business.

On this episode of The Jeff Crilley Show, Jeff sits down with entertainment host and cofounder of Playbook Marketing Danielle Hawthorne to trace her path from an entry-level job at Studio Movie Grill to interviewing some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Danielle shares how a last-minute flight to Los Angeles landed her first national junket with Mark Wahlberg and opened the door to years of red carpet conversations with A‑list talent. She reflects on what it takes to stand out during long press tours, why bringing props and playfulness can change the tone of an interview, and what she learned from memorable moments with actors like Ryan Gosling. The conversation also turns to entrepreneurship, including how the pandemic forced her to pivot and co-found Playbook Marketing to help female founders clarify their brand stories. It’s a candid look at reinvention, storytelling, and why supporting local film communities still matters.

Key Topics

  • building an entertainment hosting career in Dallas
  • the first national junket with Mark Wahlberg
  • standing out during long press tours
  • using props and playfulness in celebrity interviews
  • the Ryan Gosling Project Hail Mary interview
  • launching Playbook Marketing during COVID
  • helping female founders clarify their brand story
  • supporting the Dallas International Film Festival

Episode Timestamps

From Entry Level to A-List

There’s a moment in every celebrity press junket where the star checks out. They’ve been in the same chair for hours. They’ve answered the same five questions from fifty different reporters. They’re smiling, but they’re gone.

Danielle Hawthorne knows that moment well. She’s spent more than a decade sitting across from Hollywood’s biggest names — Mark Wahlberg, Ryan Gosling, members of the Marvel cast, and dozens more. But unlike most interviewers, Hawthorne doesn’t try to ask a better question.

She brings a Nerf gun instead.

Or a board game. Or a stuffed dinosaur from the original Jurassic Park gift shop collection her parents bought her as a kid.

“It’s a hit and miss,” Hawthorne told Jeff Crilley on The Jeff Crilley Show. “You never know what’s gonna work and what isn’t. You just kind of cross your fingers and say a little prayer — please let this work. Because sometimes it doesn’t land. Sometimes you go in and you’re like, I’m gonna shoot my shot. And sometimes they look at you like, what?“

But more often than not, something else happens. They play along. They laugh. They remember her.

“After a while they remember you,” Hawthorne said. “So the next time you do a junket, they’re like — oh, you’re the one from Dallas.”

Hawthorne’s path to Hollywood press junkets didn’t start on a red carpet. It started at a movie theater in Dallas. After living in Los Angeles and deciding it wasn’t for her, Hawthorne moved back to Texas unsure whether she could continue working in entertainment. Then someone told her about a movie theater that was hiring for entry-level positions — Studio Movie Grill.

“I went and interviewed to support both marketing and film,” Hawthorne said. “And while I was there, they were gracious enough to really support employees when they had a vision. They opened the doors and let me pursue this thing called entertainment hosting.”

Together, Hawthorne and Studio Movie Grill built a brand around her hosting work. But the real turning point came with a phone call.

“I got a call, and they said — hey, will you get on a plane tomorrow morning to go to LA to do a junket? Lionsgate said they’ll give you a spot if you show up.”

Hawthorne had been pushing for a national opportunity for months. She said yes immediately.

“I said, I’ll be on an airplane, I’ll be there. Tell me where. I’ll be there.”

That junket was with Mark Wahlberg. It was her first major national interview. From there, the names only got bigger.

The Ryan Gosling Dinosaur Moment

Of all the celebrities Hawthorne has sat across from, she says the question she gets asked most is which one stands out.

“A lot of them, because a lot of the people that I get to interview are actually really kind, really fun people,” she said. “But I just sat down with Ryan Gosling for Project Hail Mary, and he’s so lovely. He’s the loveliest of humans. He’s exactly how you would hope he would be.”

During a Zoom interview, Gosling complimented Hawthorne on her plant placement. In a move she describes as pure instinct, she decided to show him something else — a stuffed dinosaur from her Jurassic Park collection.

“For whatever reason, that moment I was like — plants, yes, but have you seen my dinosaur? And he was like, oh, great!”

It’s a small moment, but it captures what makes Hawthorne effective. She’s not performing. She’s being herself in a format that rewards personality, and celebrities respond to it because it breaks the monotony of a long press day.

“They sign a contract that says, okay, you are committed to promote this film,” Hawthorne explained. “Sometimes they’re promoting it two years after they made the film. And some of them are like — I’m contractually obligated to talk to all these reporters. It’s a long press tour. Imagine sitting in a chair, interview after interview after interview.”

When someone walks in with a game or a prop or a dinosaur, it changes the energy. That’s the strategy — even when it doesn’t feel like one.

When Hollywood Went Dark

In March 2020, the entertainment industry shut down overnight. No productions. No press tours. No junkets. No red carpets.

For Hawthorne, the work she’d spent a decade building disappeared in a day.

“Hollywood went dark, as everybody knows,” she said. “You can’t really make productions or go to the movies when COVID is going on. So everything I did went dark overnight. I was like — oh, this is new. I’ve never experienced this before.”

Rather than wait for the industry to come back, Hawthorne took stock of what she actually knew how to do. Not just interviewing. Not just hosting. Storytelling. Connecting with people quickly. Building a brand around personality.

Those are marketing skills.

Toward the tail end of the pandemic, Hawthorne and her partner launched Playbook Marketing, a company built to help female business owners and brands with female-led audiences tell their stories and grow.

“My background is in storytelling, in the movies, in exhibition, but I think that translates really well to business,” Hawthorne said. “Brands — you have to tell your story, you have to tell it in the right way. And you have to find a way to connect really quickly. It’s the same thing I have to do in an interview.”

The insight behind Playbook is simple: most business owners are exceptional at what they do, but they aren’t marketers or storytellers. And they shouldn’t have to be.

“There are a lot of business owners who are so good at what they do. But they are not marketers or storytellers. And why should they be? They’re really phenomenal at this other thing. That’s where we come in.”

Dallas as an Entertainment City

Hawthorne is bullish on Dallas as an entertainment market — and she wants people to pay attention.

At the time of the interview, she was preparing for CinemaCon, the annual conference where studios and movie theaters preview the next year of films. She also highlighted the Dallas International Film Festival as a showcase for the growing local film community.

“There’s so much cinema in this town,” she said. “We have so many movie theaters based here. We have so many filmmakers coming to Texas, filming here in Dallas and Fort Worth. If you love entertainment, if you love movies — go to the movies this year. Because the more we support entertainment and what we’re building here in town, the more of it we get in Dallas.”

It’s a fitting message from someone who came back to Dallas wondering if she could build an entertainment career outside of Los Angeles — and spent the next decade proving that she could.

Danielle Hawthorne is an entertainment host and co-founder of Playbook Marketing.

This episode of The Jeff Crilley Show was recorded at the Real News Communications studio in Dallas, Texas.

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