Eliza Dushku

I can only imagine how hard it is for an actor to prepare for a role. I’ve only worked behind the scenes—as a student, actually—and I’ve seen how one prepares for the role at hand. A pass through the script, a little time alone, a few questions about how to do some stuff, and when the camera starts rolling, things should move along almost perfectly. Maybe a few more takes, sure, but as the shoot goes longer, the actor should grow a little more comfortable with the role, to the point that it almost comes naturally.

Do two roles. Or three. Or four. Or five. Or six, at the same production. It must take a little longer for one to prepare a role. Imagine yourself as one of the “actives”, then, in the upcoming series Dollhouse: you’re dispatched by the covert organization that holds you to do multiple tasks, and once that’s done, all your memories are erased, and you are kept before the next mission. Every episode, virtually, you play a different person—it isn’t a matter of the scripts changing facts, obviously.

I guess it takes a lot getting used to. For Eliza Dushku, who plays one of the “actives”—and the lead—in the Joss Whedon-produced series, it’s an absolute challenge. “It’s the coolest, most humbling … experience,” she said. “[Some] parts are more like me, and I can kind of roll out of bed and roll into the outfit and churn them out. And other times … I’ve had some serious … challenging roles. You never get bored … I walk into my trailer, and there’s fifteen [outfits] for me to try on for the next episode, and I walk in, and there’s … horse-riding gear or … skydiving gear.”

I remember my film school years again—specifically, the end of the shoot, when you can see the actors feel good about having finished the shoot, and feeling that they’ve given justice to the roles they assumed. With the complicated nature of Dollhouse, then, you can’t blame everyone involved for defending the show with everything they have. “I’m proud of what we’re doing, and we … are doing what we wanted to do and telling the stories we wanted to tell,” Dushku added.

Her family seems to agree. Dushku, already a veteran of television shows—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Tru Calling, among others—is happy that her family enjoyed the show so much. “They were freaking out,” she said. “They were more proud and more psyched about this than [almost] anything that [I’ve done].” Chalk one more up for self-fulfillment.