Eliza Dushku

Eliza Dushku is one of the most difficult interviews in Hollywood. She is completely open, forthcoming and friendly –– but something about her wide brown eyes and seemingly glowing cheeks mesmerizes in a way that sometimes makes follow-up questions difficult. Even when she’s fighting a cold, her energy is intense. Luckily, there’s a tape recorder to catch anything a smitten interviewer might miss.

In Fox’s new drama Dollhouse, Dushku plays Echo, creator Joss Whedon’s star “Doll” for hire (the two were last paired on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Each week, as an active operative of the Dollhouse, she is implanted with a new personality tailor-made for what is required by the mission. The assignments are varied, with tasks ranging from undercover investigation to between-the-sheets fantasy. Once the tasks are fulfilled, the Dolls’ minds are wiped clean ready for the next upload of software and another adventure. Question: Early episodes of Dollhouse have you infiltrating a cult, doing some Thai boxing and extreme sports. What else have you gotten to do? Eliza Dushku: Tomorrow…I’m a dominatrix. That’s a new one. Maybe it’s not new to some people but it’s new for me, believe it or not. Dominatrix!

I got to horseback ride, riding this big black stallion through the night and they didn’t want to test the horse on the stunt double because they wanted the horse to get used to one rider, so they just gave me this black stallion at midnight out in Thousand Oaks. And they were like, "Okay, so the camera’s on a truck. Run the horse to the fence and then turn it and then just keep running along the fence as fast as you can." So I just grabbed up, thinking, "You said you can ride, right?" "Yeah, I can ride." "You’re sure you can ride, right?" I was like yeah, absolutely. Just jumped on this horse and took off. It was awesome.

Q: Isn’t that the old actor lie. "Oh, sure I can ride a horse," until you’re cast as a cowboy?

ED: I can do it and it was British saddle and everything. I could post. I posted that horse down. It was good.

Q: What’s the mission that requires a dominatrix?

ED: Wow, I don’t know if I’m supposed to but everything’s relevant in the show and Joss puts everything in for a very specific purpose. As a dominatrix, I’m actually explaining to my handler who’s driving me home from the mission that everyone thinks it’s about this, but it’s really about this and I’m sort of explaining things aren’t so black and white. There are places in between and people think dominatrix and they think freaks or everyone thinks it’s about whipping and lashing, but I’ve been doing a lot of research on YouTube, in New York actually, over the holidays about dominatrixes. I’ve learned something that I didn’t know. We have this lovely little way to place it into the show.

Q: I think if you’ve seen Real Sex on HBO, you know the real deal.

ED: I just love that it’s thought provoking. I feel like you can watch a lot of TV and it’s just pretty procedural and some things can be the same. This show is always giving you something that just makes you go, "What? I never really thought about that." It makes you sort of...it’s like brain food. That’s what Joss’s writing is like to me.

Q: What grounds the series for you, since Echo is blank each time?

ED: The Dollhouse and the tightly run organized institution that is the Dollhouse. You have Olivia Williams who is so gorgeous and so striking, stunning. She really sells and drives home the idea and the coordination and the specificity of the organization, how specific and tightly run it is. So that’s the ground base.

Q: Do you expect to deal with a personality Echo maybe wants to keep?

ED: I’m sure and even in the second episode, you start to get glimpses of characters that you almost will and would love for her to keep. Even in the first episode, it’s like she finally met the right guy. So it’s a show that explores the human condition and what people want versus what they need versus what they fantasize about, and it’s just, to me, uncanny the way Joss can touch, can tune into those feelings and those places in people and put them out in a mass way on Fox. It’s really special.

Q: And you developed it with him?

ED: Yeah, we sat down and I invited him to lunch after I did the business deal and decided that Fox, we’d had a cool relationship in the past and I wanted to do something else and I wanted to get back into a television show. I had him on the brain for sure but I hadn’t called him yet, but I sort of took a leap of faith and set things up with Fox and then called Joss. We went to a four-hour lunch where I just sort of used my womanly wiles. No, we’ve become such good friends, kind of like brother and sister and kind of like he was my watcher, my handler from when I first moved out to L.A. when I was 17 and I was a little bit of a wild child. He’s watched me and helped me and taught me over the years. I told him how bad I wanted and needed him back and he accepted and here we are.

Dollhouse premieres on Fox on Friday 13, 2009.