Dollhouse

THE SKINNY: Last Friday on the "Briar Rose" episode of the Joss Whedon created DOLLHOUSE, the mysterious villain Alpha was revealed to be actor Alan Tudyk.

His plan, of course, was to kidnap Echo to pair up with him in a NATURAL BORN KILLERS type way. For Tudyk, he loved the chance to play something other than a good guy for a change.

"I don’t get to play badasses very often," he says from a press conference interview earlier this morning in his first official conversation about playing Alpha.

Of course, this is not the first time Tudyk has worked with Whedon (he previously played Hoban ’Wash’ Washburne on FIREFLY and the SERENITY movie) and he relished the opportunity to work with the creator/writer once again.

"Joss set me up really well," says Tudyk. "He didn’t say he wanted me for the role when he first told me about it. He gave me the full scope of the guy that he was a person obsessed with Echo and 43 people in one and all these skill sets crammed into one. Because he’s 43 people at once, he’s mad. I was like, ’Oh my God, that’s so amazing, who’s playing that’and he said ’I want you to play him.’"

Here’s what else Tudyk had to say:

ON WHAT ALPHA HAS IN STORE FOR ECHO IN THE SEASON FINALE ...

"Everything that Alpha has done is to get Echo," says Tudyk. "Whenever you see Alpha, he’s screwing with the DOLLHOUSE and it’s always around Echo and his obsession with Echo. It was his plan all along to get Echo. Not he has her and he gets to fulfill his plan now which is to make her like him. Alpha, is not really Alpha. What Alpha is, is this composite people. He is 43 people in one. He has ascended in his mind to a God-like place."

ON WHAT TO EXPECT IN THE "OMEGA" EPISODE ...

"There’s maybe a kidnapping or two in the episode," Tudyk adds. "For Alpha, it’s about fulfilling his plan. Getting Echo was the second step of his ultimate plan. He has one more thing in place, where they can go on their worldwide killing spree domination. It’s making her in his own image. In his mind he is a God, he’s ascended and he wants to bring her up to his level in terms of multi-personal level."

ON CREATING THE CHARACTER ...

"I had space to create him, but I was hungry for anything [Joss] gave me," says Tudyk. "Any idea he had, any information he could fill in, it’s been shaped by these other episodes. I’ve been adding up things people have said about Alpha. Are all these impressions of Alpha true? Are they right? I was really dependent on his vision, because he’s had this guy in mind since the beginning. In the playing of it and shooting of it, we got to have fun. The main thing for the last episode, he wanted the Stephen Kepler fake-out as much as possible, although it wasn’t a very well-kept secret. They really created a great role in Stephen Kepler, a full person, before he flipped into another one of his personalities."

ON HOW THE PERSONALITY DOWNLOAD PROGRESS HAS AFFECTED ALPHA ...

"He has the ability to be the perfect human" says Tudyk. "In a lot of ways, when you’re downloading different people, you’re downloading experience and perspective. Someone can end up enlightened and another can be a villain and he takes the wrong perspective from his experiences."

ON WHETHER ALPHA WILL APPEAR ON THE BONUS EPISODE "EPITHATH ONE" THAT WILL APPEAR ON THE DVD ...

"You never know," Tudyk says, trying to keep the secrets of the "Omega" episode under wraps. "Alpha’s fate is uncertain … you’ll have to wait for the DVD."

ON WHETHER THE STEPHEN KEPLER CHARACTER HAS ANY KIND OF RELATION TO TOPHER (FRAN KRANZ) ...

"I think there is nothing I can confirm or deny," says Tudyk. "There is certainly a lot of similarities, there’s some mannerisms. I don’t know if he is his father. In a world where personalities can be downloaded, there seems to be in a little [or Topher] in there. Alpha knew Topher from when he was a doll and we’ll get to see some of that [in the upcoming episode]."

ON THE STATUS OF ALPHA’S INVOLVEMENT WITH LAURENCE DOMINC (REED DIAMOND) WHO WAS SENT TO THE ATTIC ...

"That’s how I was contacting them," says Tudyk. "I didn’t realize that he was gone and put on a shelf. I sent it to him, because he would be able to get the Alpha password, so I could be Kepler, looking at one hand while the other hand was stealing."