Eliza Dushku

Eliza Dushku: Echo in the House

“Welcome to our Dollhouse!” Eliza Dushku beams. She’s speaking about the elaborate set for Joss Whedon’s new drama about a mysterious agency that hires out people with specially-tailored personalities - including Dushku’s character Echo. The Dollhouse set itself is elegant and multi-layered, with a variety of interconnecting spaces that make it easy for cameras to slide through. The actress took time out to tell Abbie Bernstein more about the show.

Does the set look the way you imagined it would?

It surpassed what I would have expected. It’s beautiful!

The story going around is that you and Joss Whedon went out for lunch to talk about your career. He then went to the bathroom, came back to the table and had the idea for Dollhouse. Is that what really happened?

I don’t know if you know my history as an actress, but I tripped and fell at my brother’s audition when I was nine years old and got my first part. My mom was a professor in Boston and went, “Well it will be good experience, she’ll meet lots of people, she’ll travel a lot, and who knows? Then when it fizzles out she can do what she wants to do and go back to school and be whoever she wants to be." That’s truly always been in my mind.

The way that I see my career is that I’ve had some really awesome luck, but the real luck was when I met Joss when I was 17 and I came out to LA to do Buffy. I came into this successful show and I was getting all of this praise and I was doing all of this material that I really loved. That actually made me really start to love acting. I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll defer my college application and stick around for a while and be an actress.’

And then I did a few films and you can’t win them all. Everyone has those movies that you want to buy every copy and put in the closet and burn them, but I maybe have more than some. I always try, and things can seem like a good idea at the time, and I am really proud of some of the work that I’ve done. But when it comes down to it, if it ain’t on the page, then it ain’t on the stage. Good writing is so important.

On the one hand, I’m never ashamed or never threatened or made uncomfortable when people ask me how I feel about being typecast as a strong, smart young woman. I can think of worse things to be typecast as, but I hit this point of, “Okay, what now?” I called Joss because I just knew that he was someone who saw me in different ways and he would tell me about it. Every time he came and saw me in a play he would say, “That piece of work that you did was special and important, because of this and it showed you doing that,” which most people don’t see.

So I called the guy that I had trusted the most in my 17 years in the business. He came through and I bought him a hot steamy Gouda pizza at The Ivy [restaurant in LA]. We started out talking about our careers, and then we just started talking about what’s on television, and what we were watching, and what we’re interested in, and what we saw on the internet the week before. “There was that guy, and he had a fetish about this! And isn’t it wild that there are people on the internet where you can click and have so much control of what you see, and yet everyone is so out of control!”

We just started having a philosophical conversation about all those things, and I had laid in that I had a deal at Fox and that I was up for doing a show – there was lots of strategy in that meeting! So it was a four-hour evolution of, “Are you hungry? Let’s eat, I have a few questions about my career, what’s going on in your life, what’s going on in my life?” And then, God bless him, Joss just got up and went to the bathroom and when he came back, he sat down and said, “It’ll be called Dollhouse and it’s a show about this. It’s a show about all the things we were talking about.”

In Dollhouse, the ‘dolls’ are chosen to be imprinted with various identities, and when they’re done with one job, the memory of that identity is erased and replaced with a new identity on the next job. Is the premise of the show a metaphor for being an actress?

An actress and a young woman. I think in our society today there’s this constant pressure on men and women, but especially young women. Every day you’re being pulled in all directions and trying to figure out who people want you to be, so I think there’s a parallel.

In addition to being the star, you’re also executive producer on Dollhouse with Joss Whedon. How do you divide your jobs?

I have a hat in my trailer. It’s my producer hat and I put it on when Joss wants to talk about all things producorial (laughs). It was the kind of thing where we’re in this together and we’re really a team in what we’re doing, and he cares how I feel about things. He’ll come into my trailer and say, “Okay, Eliza, put your script down and put your producer hat on and come out here, I want to talk to you about something [regarding the production],” and so he really has included me in that way.

Have you had to do much physical training for the show’s action scenes?

I’m working out with a trainer, a good friend. I think he makes real good women’s bodies. He doesn’t go for über-skinny, but he doesn’t go for really bulked up – he tailors everyone’s bodies to be strong and functional. He has it down to a science.

So, to sum up, how would you describe your experience of working on Dollhouse with Joss Whedon?

It’s one day at a time. We have an awesome team of writers. People are excited. My confidence and my enthusiasm and my excitement have only gotten more fierce. It’s like a dream to be working with someone who has such a serious soul and such as serious voice, and he knows what he is saying and what he is creating and how important and how relevant it is.

And Joss is a liberated, clever guy. He wants people to think that he is super-cynical, but he is not at all. He has this view of the world that I feel is so extraordinary, because nothing is black and white. He can play in that grey area and with good versus evil so spectacularly that every script and every piece of material that I get from him is a joy.

Dollhouse begins airing on Fox on February 13 2009.