Buffy The Vampire Slayer

NEW YORK — Curled on a chair in her hotel room, Eliza Dushku is multitasking while a hair stylist and a makeup artist primp her for a late-night talk show spot.

The actress finishes a salmon salad, takes a drag on a cigarette and chats about "Wrong Turn," her new movie. "It’s really scary, isn’t it?" she says, with a mischievous look.

It is, but Dushku, 22, isn’t worried about becoming her generation’s Jamie Lee Curtis.

Dushku (rhymes with "push-koo") won fans as the dangerously sexy Faith on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and its spinoff, "Angel." In 2000, she did a funny variation on her edgy-girl bit in the hit cheerleading comedy "Bring It On." She was silly in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" (2001) and held her own last year opposite Robert De Niro and James Franco in "City by the Sea."

In "Wrong Turn," now in theaters, Dushku stars as a monster-fighter in lowriders.

"I can think of a lot worse things to be typecast as than a strong woman who stands up for herself," Dushku says. "My characters are tough right out of the gate, but there’s more behind it. They’re strong, but their toughness comes from defensiveness."

She grew up in Boston with three older brothers. Her mother, a college professor, divorced her father before she was born. Her introduction to acting was accidental: When one of her brothers auditioned for a commercial in 1991, it was 10-year-old Eliza who caught the casting director’s eye, after she fell and made a commotion.

"I like being the center of attention," she says, smiling.

Within three years, she was playing the daughter of De Niro ("This Boy’s Life") and Arnold Schwarzenegger ("True Lies"). At 17, after finishing high school — and declaring herself legally independent from her parents — Dushku moved to Los Angeles and auditioned for "Buffy."

"I didn’t know if she could pull off being tough," says Joss Whedon, the show’s creator. "But she’s the tomboy guys wish tomboys looked like."

Although her mother is a "not-strict ’feminist Mormon,’ " Dushku says her relatives found her TV character’s forthright sexuality a little disturbing. But, she says, "I was raised to be independent."

This fall, Dushku will be back on TV, starring in Fox’s "Tru Calling" as a morgue attendant who can go back in time to keep the living from becoming the dead. Also coming up is "The Kiss," a movie that brings to life Robert Doisneau’s famous 1950 photograph "Kiss by the Hotel de Ville."

Leaving the downtown hotel, Dushku is dressed to turn heads. Starlet life, she says, "can be frenetic. It’s like, ’Now talk, go, go!’ But it’s OK. I’m good at that."