A faint scar runs across Tina Fey’s left cheek, the result of a violent cutting attack by a stranger when Fey was five. Her husband [Jeff Richmond] says, “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.” [...]

“That scar was fascinating to me,” Richmond recalls. “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. When you have that kind of thing happen to you, that makes you scared of certain things, that makes you frightened of different things, your comedy comes out in a different kind of way, and it also makes you feel for people.”

Fey herself rarely mentions the episode. “It’s impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it,” she says.

Too true. Still, we feel for Fey — it's a terrible thing to have had happen (and certainly, it can't help that fully half of Maureen Dowd's VF article obsesses over Fey's appearance in some way). Almost as bad? Nancy Franklin's weirdly cruel, inaccurate 30 Rock writeup in the current New Yorker, which slams Fey and every other cast member but one in a piece that really should be retitled, "I Wanna Nail Alec Baldwin; Here is Why." Don't worry, Nance — that Eva Longoria profile offer should be yours before you even know it!

• What Tina Wants [Vanity Fair]

WHAT'S NEW: Edward Norton still may not be doing much to promote The Incredible Hulk, but once all the behind-the-scenes drama died down and we actually got a chance to see the film, we realized, "Hey — this isn't so bad." Or rather, it is what it is: A loud blockbuster for 14-year-old boys, with top-to-bottom miscasting (with the exception of a pathologically brutal Tim Roth) exacerbated by action auteur Louis Leterrier's hamfisted touch. But! It is kind of spectacularly dumb, arresting summer viewing — we've heard it described as King Kong meets The Bourne Identity, which is just about perfect — and predictions of a $55-$60 million opening might even be understating things. It certainly won't get much competition from the paucity of what's around it this week, particularly...

THE BIG LOSER: The Happening has miserable word-of-mouth and an R-rating working against it, and while we can't add much beyond our previous dispatches and what our own Reviewer X mentioned here on Monday, we can say that we'll be pretty shocked if Manoj's Folly cracks $20 million by Sunday night. And that's probably a number Fox would be happy with, even if it means third or even fourth place overall behind Hulk, Kung Fu Panda and possibly Zohan. But this isn't Speed Racer — if this does hit $20 mil, expect a backlash to the backlash by the time we reconvene next week.

THE UNDERDOG: We alluded yesterday to the unhinged creepiness of Quid Pro Quo, a mystery/romance/mindfuck featuring Nick Stahl as a paraplegic radio journalist who, er... stumbles? Rolls? OK, happens upon a subculture of "wanna-be" disability fetishists. Among them: Vera Farmiga, who takes an immediate (and suspicious) liking to Stahl's baffled chair jockey even as their physical trajectories cross radically — hers en route to the paralysis she craves, his en route to walking again. The actors' heavy lifting saves writer-director Carlos Brooks's pretentious ass on more than one occasion, but conceptually, anyway, Quid wields the kind of strength and endurance M. Night Shyamalan only experiences these days from his hair product.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD releases include the terminal-cancer buddy bomb The Bucket List; the Hayden Christensen teleportation adventure Jumper; Michael Haneke's American remake of his torture opus Funny Games; Zak Penn's terrific poker-culture satire The Grand; and finally, by popular demand, What's Happening! The Complete Series.

So are you Team Hulk or Team Happening? Can Manoj shatter expectations and bring home the hit he so desperately needs? Did we miss a diamond or some other, less-precious gem in the rough? It's Father's Day weekend — what does your old man want to see?

It's about as fucked-up as it sounds, but as Fiona, the femme fatale opposite Nick Stahl's paralyzed investigative radio reporter, Farmiga efficiently mines what's perhaps the final frontier of on-screen sexuality. It takes a special actress to make a corset work with leg braces, and an even more special actress to successfully play it for mystery, vulnerability and dark humor all at once. Farmiga tells us all about the journey in five easy steps after the jump.

So in Quid Pro Quo we've got able-bodies versus amputee wanna-bes versus paraplegic pretenders versus garden-variety fetishists. At what point did you read the script and say, "Yep — this one's for me"?

Probably when I heard her name was Fiona Ankany. Sometimes it's in a name before you even read anything. I saw that and said, "That's a bell that needs to be rung." But I also grew up watching quirky detective stories and oddball romances — Murder She Wrote and The Love Boat. And this was one I'd never read before. And there's got to be something about a woman in the script that turns my head. I couldn't stop staring at this one.

Did you know this subculture existed before the script came along?

I'd never heard of this before. And the related literature at the time — we filmed it right after The Departed — was hardly even there. Any time you sit down with an apotemnophiliac — actually, even that is probably an outdated term for it. Now it's like "body image integrity disorder." The only support system I could find was online. The only explainable thing is that the anguish of wanting to be paralyzed is greater than that of amputation.

Doesn't that kind of unexplainability complicate you getting to know your character?

Yes. Fiona is riddled with contradictions. She shrugs off her syndrome as much as she revels in it. She's a total overachiever and yet she can't achieve the peace of wholeness. It's a real riddle. It's not something that she has full grasp of — it's not just one thing like her guilt or childhood or attention-seeking disorder. It's all of that — a full life's equation. That ambiguity actually was a big part of playing her. Even all these testimonies I read online are totally unexplainable; it's impossible to explain compulsion.

With the exception of The Departed, you often seem to be drawn to characters with afflictions: drug addiction, depression, psychosis and now, ahem, apotemnophilia. Do you ever consider that when choosing roles?

I probably do. That's what cranes my head about characters in scripts that I read. I'm sure of it, actually. But they're not always so extreme — they may just find themselves in very extreme circumstances where they're not extreme.

Like you seducing Nick Stahl with a corset, leg braces and crutches?

That scene is really interesting because wanna-bes will tell you this has nothing to do with sexual gratification. Instead it's about the arousal of their identity as a fully-functioning human beings only if they were amputated. That scene is very contradictory to that tenet, but Fiona herself is very much an actress; she has to play dress-up to discover certain truths about herself. And anyway, listen: Once you're wearing that outfit for a crew of people, you act. Plus we had Sinead O'Connor playing in the background — "Three Babies." I'm sure that helped.