Topic: Chilled Out CG & DAni interview

[puddin]

Chilled Out
Danielle and Chicken George, the week's two ''Big Brother'' evictees, talk about what it's like to get iced by Will and Boogie. (By the way, Bob Barker, watch your back!) by Josh Wolk

Danielle Hendrix entered the house without a friend and was nearly evicted in week 1. But one of the craftiest players in Big Brother history climbed her way back and nearly made it all the way from underdog to top dog, until she became the umpteenth victim of a Chill Town betrayal. Will they never learn?

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You were furious with Erika for breaking her word and putting you up for eviction. Considering that this entire house is built on a foundation of broken promises, do you think it's unfair to hold her to a higher standard of honesty? (Mind you, ''higher standard'' is relative.)
DANIELLE HENDRIX: I guess for game reasons, no, it's not fair. But you have to understand that when James left, I went to Erika [to make a pact], and I'm just a very loyal person. And people don't know that Erika came to me earlier in the game and said, ''Listen, I'll be your Jason, and you'll be my Jack.'' I cherished that, and I always thought she was gonna work with me, and I had her back, and for her not to do that, I was taken aback. Right now, in retrospect, I understand it's a game, but at that moment I was completely hurt.

Do you think it was a good move for her?
It all depends. If she gets in the final two, it's a good move. But I was gonna move mountains to make sure she got to the final two. If I had won HOH the week she won, I was gonna nominate Chill Town. I wouldn't have blinked twice.

If Will and Mike hadn't turned on James, would your allegiance to the Legion of Doom have taken precedence over your pact with Erika?
Absolutely. Because I never made that commitment to Erika until James left. My commitment was to the Legion and James. That was my goal. And I considered us to be the final four, and I expected it to be a gentleman's game, and we were gonna play real hard, and let the best person win.

A gentleman's game? Have you met Chill Town? Everyone knows they're liars, and yet they're still there. How do they do it?
Will is the puppet master. He's tall, he's good-looking, he's educated, he's charismatic. And he can do stuff to people and say, ''I'm sorry,'' and people are supposed to forgive him and move on. He and Mike have that influence on people. I don't know why they're still in the game. Of course, I'm responsible. I kept them in the game because I had an alliance with them. But...ugh, I just wish I would have won that HOH. I was gonna turn that game upside down. They would not have expected it.

When Will and Mike assured you they were keeping you this week, did you ever believe them?
I could tell just by looking at them that they were lying through their teeth. I even looked at Will and said, ''Look, gamer to gamer, man, just tell me.'' He said, ''No, no, you're safe.'' Will does have a tell. He does this nod and this long blink, and I went, ''Oh, he's lying.'' And then Boogie said, ''You know, Will kind of made me nervous,'' and I went, ugh, these guys are lying, and I knew I was done. That's why when they asked me if I had any last words to say, I knew I was gone, and I just asked them to reconsider.

Has anyone's ''last words'' before eviction ever affected anyone's vote?
I know. It's like, why bother? I think people's minds are pretty much made up. I was very sincere in my last, ''Please keep me in here,'' and they couldn't, and that's fine. It is a game.

You were friendly with James before this season started. Did you have a pre-alliance?
I really didn't. A lot of people think we did. I knew that he most likely had alliances with his people in season 6, so my thing was [before the show started], I kept denying, denying, denying that I was gonna do All-Stars.

So when other BB alums called you, you said you weren't going to play?
Right. Because I didn't want people to start preparing to kick me out. Plus, it prevented people from trying to form alliances with me, because they figured I wasn't doing the show, therefore I was kept out of the loop on a lot of things. I wanted to walk in guilt free. I didn't want to have any prearranged alliances.

But couldn't that hurt you if everyone else came into the house already teamed up?
That's true, but things change. I knew people were going to form alliances, but you didn't know what the game would entail, you didn't know who was going to actually make it into the house, so for you to form an alliance so early and say this is how we're going to do it, that's premature. You have to wait and see how people act in a stressful situation, how friendships may develop, how enemies may develop. It's really in your best interest to come into the house without any alliance.

The final four are essentially two couples. Do you think it's a disadvantage to play this game as a married person, which eliminates flirting as a strategy?
I don't know. I'm thankful to be married. I guess if I was single and I was gorgeous and had a hot body, I probably would have used that to my advantage, too. But speaking from a woman's point of view, I prefer to be known as someone who's smart and who used strategy than someone who used my good looks or my sexuality to get further in the game. That's just me. When you look at past reality shows, and past winners, that's the gist. Women are either supposed to be this young sexy thing and win it, or quiet coattail riders. I like a woman to win this show that's just balls-out playing the game hard and smart.

Does it frustrate you that flirty behavior keeps getting rewarded?
It kind of does. But it's just what society deems women...when you're a woman who's strategic, conniving, scumbagging, you're considered a bitch. But when a guy does it, oh, he's a mastermind. It's just sad that that's the way society perceives women. But I prefer to be known as a strategic player than to be known for this vixen, dolly, cutesy, sexy woman that got my way through whatever, through flirting with people.

I gotta ask you: When did the term ''scumbagging'' become part of Big Brother vernacular?
Do you know how that started? Roddy, season 3. He called it scumbagging. Marcellas and I used it a lot in our season, and we used it in All-Stars, and everybody picked it up. It's just terminology for when you're gonna stab someone in the back.

How did you change your strategy from season 3's?
Perception is part of the game, let's face it. So yes, I did a lot of deceiving, but at the same time it was important to me that whoever went home, I wanted to be respectful. I tried not to attack people personally.

In season 3, it was the evicted contestants seeing all your trash talk about them in the diary room that lost you the game.
Yeah, that and the live feeds, and people who saw them influencing the ex-houseguests' votes. This time, I don't know....When Erika said, ''Everyone's scared to death of you, no one can beat you in the end,'' it was a slap in the face. Damn! I gotta go stab somebody or slap somebody!

Other than winning more HOH's, is there anything you could have done differently that might have kept you in the house longer?
I don't think I could have done anything differently. A lot of people said you knew Chill Town was gonna do this or that, but Chill Town kept me in the game longer than I needed to be. They threw that POV for me, we worked together, we got Will to do some conniving, so it really helped me get far in the game. I'm not gonna curse my blessings.

[puddin]

When George Boswell, a.k.a. Chicken George, was invited into the Big Brother: All-Stars house, nobody thought he'd manage to wear more than one costume before he got the boot. But somehow, through keeping his head down and the dishes clean, he made it to the final five before getting evicted. Was there a method behind the cluelessness? Uh...no.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So let me get this straight. You went in there with no strategy. No strategy at all.
GEORGE BOSWELL:I had no strategy, no plans, no friends, no nothing! [Cackles.] I go into everything the same way. I believe life is an improv show, and so's this. It's funny, when I got in there, people got all these plans, and these people are out already to pick each other off. I was just getting to know their names!

Well, that nonstrategy did get you to the final five, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
Not bad, huh? And I never had an alliance through the whole game! I had the gym alliance that I could trust: I had Bowflex and Tread. That was it! [Big laugh.]

As the game went on, did you ever think, ''I just might make it to the final two''?
I did think, as I was going down the line, if all this plays out right, there's a possibility I could be in the end. Sitting in that nomination chair, you ain't gotta worry about anything but getting thrown out of the house, but you ain't gotta sweat the other stuff. You know what, let these other people do the fighting and the hashing out; I'll sit in the nomination chair. I didn't have nobody to even talk to me about the game until six weeks in. I was just getting bits and pieces of information about, hey, you better vote this way, stuff like that there, but I had no idea what actually was going on in the game 'cause I wasn't invited to any meetings. As soon as there was an HOH competition or power of veto, you'd see people splitting into all their different rooms to have their strategy sessions. Me, I headed to the kitchen, did my own thing. I was probably the biggest ultimate floater in reality-show history.

So everybody just scattered into different rooms, leaving you alone?
Correct. The HOH room was pretty much occupied by Janelle. Their group would go upstairs; usually Doc and Boogie, they'd hit the gym or the other room; people would take the red room. So that just left me out there. Honestly, I was basically by myself the whole game. I think I got invited to two meetings, and they were two or three minutes.

That must have been a lonely existence.
I did feel very lonely in the beginning of the game. The season 6 players had all played together before. They knew each other really well; they'd been in contact with each other. They knew what they were gonna do before they even got into the game. And there were other alliances that were already out there. And then there was just myself, who knew nobody. I had never had any contact with any of these people whatsoever.

This was also a much more competitive game than you went through in the first season.
Yeah. In season 1 it was easy, because once you nominated the people, the American people voted them out. So you had that whole week where it really didn't make any difference what you did. You didn't have the POV competition. This is a lot better game, because there's a lot more excitement. You just did not know how the game was gonna flip. Like, when Jase was up for nomination against Will, the majority had it that Jase was gonna stay. I was walking in to cast my vote for Will, and Danielle comes up and says she went upstairs late last night and they flipped it, we're gonna keep Will in the game. It had flipped that quickly. There was excitement going on all the time.

So what does an all-slop diet do to your system?
I haven't had a bowel movement in 30 days. [Laughs.] I lost 20 pounds, and I was dropping five pounds a week. Slop looks and tastes just like cement dust. I tried everything I could to make that stuff taste halfway decent. No luck. So finally I ended up eating it like dust and water, just choking it down. But then I didn't have much energy. If you don't have much energy, and you just lock yourself in your room and don't come out and socialize, you're sunk dead. So it was difficult to keep up my attitude and also have to deal with not having no food, just a slop diet. Also, the majority of your socializing in the Big Brother house takes place in the kitchen, and that was hard, because everyone else has something, and I'm stuck on this dust diet.

Are you nervous about seeing Howie in the sequester house?
I hope my wife Teresa's paid my health insurance! [Laughs.] I got this boxing helmet left over from one game, and I brought that, 'cause I know he's not gonna be happy with me. But I had no choice [but to nominate Howie]. I wasn't gonna nominate Janelle, because Howie did get a chance to compete in the POV competition, and she did not. Yes, it is a game, and games have to be played with some sportsmanship, and I thought, that isn't the way to send that girl down the road.

If you were trying to be a good sport, you may have been the only one.
Coulda been a possibility. I was trying to be as honest as possible and not tell a bunch of lies to people. I was trying to play a righteous game, but that game is brutal.

So where will you go when the show is over?
I'm gonna go back to Las Vegas. I was the announcer, the promoter, and an entertainer for the Tropicana casino. See, I'd worked for my hometown baseball team, the Rockford [Ill.] Riverhawks, where I was their on-field promotions director. I'd run all the little games, sing the seventh-inning song, whatever. We had really good attendance, and they were real happy, and they give me a ticket to go to Vegas as a bonus. I go to Vegas, and I see this job this one guy was doing, and I thought, I could do a really good job at that, I talked to the people, and they hired me. And it was one of the best experiences I ever could have had....Opportunities offer opportunities. If you don't do the opportunities, you never know what the next thing is around the bend for you. My ultimate goal in doing Big Brother again was it was an opportunity. I've never passed one up.

What do you think this opportunity could lead to?
You know what my ultimate goal is now? I want to host The Price Is Right, dude!

Well, I guess Bob Barker can't stick around forever.
That's what I'm thinking! And I've got the experience now, and you never know what can happen in this business.

(Posted:09/01/06)
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