Eliza Dushku

After 18 Years of Acting, the Star of Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse” Comes Into Her Own. As Echo/Caroline on Fox’s “Dollhouse,” Eliza Dushku is a different character every week, depending on what the clients who pay to have her programmed want. As Dushku sits in her trailer on the Fox lot to talk with Venice, we find there are some def­inite similarities between the actress and her TV alter-ego. Don’t get us wrong, no one is going to tell the independent and strong-willed Dushku what to do.

But the 28-year-old Boston native, who has CNN playing on a big screen in the background while she downloads the new Jay-Z on her computer when I enter the trailer, is by her own admission an amalga­mation of different parts and people.

For starters, she is the daughter of a political sci­ence teacher in Boston who remains fiercely involved in politics. I first met her when we were both out at several events supporting John Kerry in 2004 and today she is turning attention to global matters as she tells tales of trips to Uganda to help women forced into being child soldiers. At the same time, there is the spirit of the defiant Faith she played on “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer,” and rebel­lious cheerleader Missy in the hit film, Bring It On. A one-time regular on the Hollywood nightlife circuit, she still likes to go out and dance and hit the clubs, though she says proudly all she ingests is her nicorette gum and sugar-free Red Bull.

Having literally stumbled into a career in acting when she tripped at her brother’s audition at the age of nine, Dushku has spent her life in front of the cameras, along the way enjoying standout work such as City by the Sea, where she played opposite James Franco and Robert De Niro, 2008’s winning comedy Bottle Shock, and her lead turn in last year’s The Alphabet Killer. Like many though, Dushku has wrestled with the ups and down of celebrity. Coming from “Buffy,” widely regarded as a TV classic, she went on to the underrated “Tru Calling,” a show that she tells us has some celebrity fans, but suffered a quick death. Now reunited with “Buffy” creator Joss Whedon on “Dollhouse,” Dushku is again finding herself in demand. And as she tells Venice, she is definitely enjoying it, all the while figuring out who Eliza Dushku is and where she’s going.

Venice: I was just getting the tour of the set and I was like, “I know it all. I watch the show every week.” And I feel like it’s been getting better and better as it goes on.

Eliza Dushku: Someone said it, when Joss is left alone he kind of does his best work. I’m not saying anyone was bothering him or anything, but I just watched the first episode the other night and we had a lot going on and a lot to accomplish in that first show. It’s a lot in one and to still have an engagement in the story. It kind of brings it. Then the next episode, I was watching pieces of it last night in ADR and it’s the same show, but it’s real­ly about the characters this year. It’s just really rich, the texture. I get emotional watching it. [laughs]

Did you have any clue what Joss was going to do or what he had in mind?

We were sort of talking about life, things that were interest­ing to him and to me, and society. We were talking about the normal stuff we always talk about, and I didn’t know I was going to lay it on him. It was more just a friendly, maybe get­ting a little advice, because I was entertaining the idea of doing another show, but I was really apprehensive going into it. If I found someone that I wanted to bring to them to work with and we were going to try to do something. So I wanted to talk to him, but like, three hours into the lunch, he got up to go to the bathroom, came back, and as people have heard, he says, “It’ll be called ‘Dollhouse.’” We’d been sort of talking about all these abstract things and ideas and realities and then it just hit him in the bathroom. [laughs] Then literally we hopped in his car to drive home, I parked my car at his house, and he was like, “How am I going to tell my wife that we came up with this show? This was not the plan.”

Would you have done a show with anybody else at that point?

I did call him and I didn’t get a call back. And I was like, “Well, if he calls back, he calls back.” And so I had taken one other meeting with somebody that the studio had offered and, I don’t know, a lot of stuff on television, understandably, you’re in the same place every week or the same skin every week, the same kind of clothing, the same kind of environment. And doing “Tru Calling” I realized I really got sick of that morgue. [laughs] I really got sick of even Tru, the character, and the peo­ple around her. I am grateful for that show for a lot of reasons and there are a lot of fans of that show. [Quentin] Tarantino called me one day and he was like, “Hey, Dushku, I just spent the whole weekend watching the ‘Tru Calling’ box and I love it.” I was like, “Wow, maybe it wasn’t so bad.”

When you’re in the midst of something you need that perspective.

It was a tough act to follow when I was with Joss on a show that was established and they had a rhythm and a groove and I showed up for my first television experi­ence and it was like off the chain. I had this amazing character that audiences instantly fell in love with and hated and rooted for and everything between. I guess I just thought that’s how it was.

With “Buffy” you had all of those peo­ple to interact with so it was almost like a film, where “Tru Calling” was the same four or five people and that was it. From an acting standpoint I would imagine working with all those people made a difference. And then you come back to a show like this and you get that variety again.

Oh yeah, that was the main criteria. I was like, “Joss, I wanna do something where I play something [different].” “What would you wanna play?” I’m like, “Something different every week, but not like an alien.” It was sort of broad and then he went, “Are you serious about this?” He was kind of excited. I left, and I ended up going off on a trip and when I was on the trip it was weird, we literally crossed and emailed each other in the same five minutes a week later. I was email­ing him a story of this adventure that I just had in the mountains in Colorado and he had emailed the entire pitch for the show, complete with like a one-sheet, an old pic­ture of me saying, “Who do you want me to be?” I was like, “Damn, this dude is not playing around.” I was so psyched and right when I wrote mine, he wrote back and said, “And this would be episode two.” He took my adventure story and made it into the tar­get episode last season.

So from that start you imbued Echo/Caroline with your life.

I’ve been acting for 18 years. I’m always sort of on the move, my mother’s a political science professor in Boston and teaches international politics and socio-economics and I’ve just traveled my whole life and met people and shared stories and I was always sort of a weird little mimic kid, adapting and absorbing from different environments. So I do feel like I’m a lot of people at the same time or I can just tap into different people depending on where I am. So he saw that too I guess and here we are.

Who do you want to be and who do you want to play?

I love the Caroline video that we shot where I am talking to the camera. They say, “What do you want to do?” And I say, “Well, I want to travel around the world in a plane that I designed and pilot and do this and do that, save the world.” I’m like, “Yeah, so I want to do that. Is that too much to ask?” I’m just like, “Yeah, boy, he gets me.”

Is that what Caroline wants to do or what Eliza wants to do?

I think a little bit of both. I tripped and fell at my brother’s audition at nine, but I never wanted to be an actress as a little kid. I wanted to be a lawyer or a teacher like my mother, or I wanted to swim with beluga whales in the arctic. I had all these different things and then that happened. But nothing ever went, “Oh, this is it.” Like it was always, “Well, okay, I’m going to do this now and then I’m going to figure out what I really want to do, and in the meantime, just sort of travel around.” So I think I still am sort of waiting out…now it’s not waiting, it’s more going, “I have another career some­where down there.”

I used to see you out all the time at John Kerry events in 2004. As a democrat, how do you feel about Obama so far?

I love the way he took on the responsibility and now is trying to empower everybody and the people to take on their responsibility in their own little ways. Maybe overall we’ve all become more responsible and can reap the benefits.

Tell me about your political background since I know your parents were such a big influence in that regard.

My parents were socialists. [laughs] They are not ashamed. They have it on their out­going message on their voicemail. “You’ve reached the socialist Dushkus.” [laughs] Because she’s so involved in it, it was such a part of my life growing up. We didn’t really watch TV, my mother read the newspaper and then that’s what we talked about. With the time factor and working, I get a lot out of Bill Maher, I get a lot out of snooping around online. But I think my focus has in some ways shifted to things globally. I’ve always been an internationalist because of her and just [interested] in empowering women around the world. There was a beautiful piece in the New York Times magazine in the last month and you read all these statis­tics and it just sort of blows your mind. On the one hand it’s a daunting area as a whole when you see globally how disempowered women have been. At the same time it’s also really inspiring when you focus on what has worked and how exciting and how certain parts are becoming. I travel a lot with Global Exchange, it’s a group out of San Francisco and they do these socio-economic study tours. I try to do at least one a year. I went to Uganda on the hiatus; we were studying the rehabilitation of coerced child soldiers, men and women, women that were raped and mutilated and abducted and forced to fight in this army and kill their families. And going in there, meeting these people, and listening to how they cope was massive to us; “live­no-longer” tragedies and the forgiveness and resilience and tenacity, I go and see those lessons. And yes, you go somewhere and there’s poverty and you don’t have the luxuries we have here, but psychologically and emotionally the strength is mind-blow­ing. And I really depend on my mother and also my step-father. He’s definitely an opin­ionated guy. He was a librarian at her uni­versity for years and years. He has a web-site called “Nightingale at Large,” it’s basi­cally a political blog he does. Just him, from our house in Boston. He’s retired. I depend on them a lot. And when I’m not in the Hol­lywood bubble, I don’t think I’m ever really in the bubble because I feel like I have too much out [of it] and good people in my life to drown in there.

What is the bubble?

Man, I was creeping around the outside of it last night. [cracks up] I feel like the bub­ble is starting to break because, even just with Obama, I feel like more and more [peo­ple] have come out and started to stand for things as opposed to being so afraid of what everyone is going to think. People have started to focus in on what’s important to them and some bigger ethical and moral conversations have started happening and I feel like there’s a lot of people taking more risks in town.

Celebrities who supported Kerry were lambasted when he lost. Maybe it’s just safer to speak up when you’re on the winning side. What’s your take?

Well, I can hear sometimes when people go, “So, just because you’re a celebrity that gives you the right to stand on a soapbox and preach and you expect people to lis­ten.” On the other hand, as entertainers we’re also people and we’re constantly absorbing the world everyday and people are asking what we think. As long as enter­tainers aren’t claiming to know it all, it’s an expression of opinion. It’s freedom of opin­ion and speech. It’s amazing because literal­ly last night I was coming out of this night­club and these guys were running after me to my car and they threw like six random questions at me about kind of like big issues, or even if it was just asking me about Patrick Swayze as I’m walking out of this booming nightclub. They want any sort of sound bite, anything that comes out of your mouth that they can grab onto and either make it your headline or your tagline and make it represent everything you are or tear you apart for it.

So what do you do? Do you answer the questions?

To a point, but then I always pause. I see that a lot with younger actors or people who come into the business and they feel like they want to be honest. But it’s a hard busi­ness to be totally honest in. And there are politics, and if you don’t care, you don’t care. But then you deal with the repercus­sions of that. But I just maintain I’m human, I’m 28 years old, I’m constantly learning and growing and changing and I have the right to change my mind. That’s the right of a human being. I have the right to say one thing 10 years ago when I was 17 and have it feel a completely different way today or the right to feel a completely different way tomorrow than what I’m sitting here telling you. It’s about acceptance and we really don’t want to accept certain things, whatev­er they are. So I always try to pause, think about it, and speak clearly and directly. But I filter a little more now than I did when I was younger because your first thought can sometimes come back and bite you in the ass. [laughs] Also, context is such a major thing. It’s unbelievable. We can sit here and talk all day about one thing and I can make a comment about the flowers and that becomes the whole [story]. But it is what it is. And sometimes it’s frustrating and some­times it can be upsetting and get into, “But how can they say that? That’s not what I meant.” It’s part of what we signed up for.

Maybe, but I don’t know how you come out of a nightclub at one in the morning and not say, “Dude, it’s one in the morning, I’m tired, leave me alone.”

Yeah, it used to really fill me with a hun­dred plus forms of fear and insecurity and indignation and all these things. But I really have, after 18 years, come to learn that it is what it is. Maybe something’s taken out of context, something’s misrepresented, but is it the end of the world? Hardly. Is there going to be another interview next week or the next day? Probably.

After 18 years of this and having gone through different levels of fame — Bring It On blows up huge, “Buffy” is a phe­nomenon, and then “Tru Calling” gets cancelled — do you have a different appreciation for acting and everything that comes with it?

I’m gonna lay on the cheese, but I have a lot of faith. I’ve got faith; if something hap­pens it all happens for a reason. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done this and at the time it can break your heart or drive you crazy or be the most amazing thing and you never want it to end, but I just truly feel like you can’t live fame and the business like that. You have to know what you know and I keep up my end. I work my tail off. I respect the people that I work with and every single person is a part of this and I try and brighten up when I get too serious about it, like, “Have a good time.” We’re so lucky. Even on my worst days I am so lucky. And again I know I sound like that girl, but that’s how I live now, not just being heartbroken. In my earlier years I fell into the Hollywood numbing-it-out trap a little bit and people getting you to dance on tabletops and teaching you that’s the way to cope, by numbing out. I don’t like to live that way anymore. And that’s a lot of Echo. I’m awake and even if being awake is some­times scary I don’t want to go back to sleep and I don’t want to be in that place. I at least want to be feeling and living in today and onward. That’s the big difference I would say. And even when there were times when I was like, “This career isn’t for me, it’s too much. I just want to be a normal person and go to school in Boston,” I start­ed weighing what I love about this business, like the way it lets me do all these other things that I want to do. My brother and I are going to Florence on Friday night for the weekend to go to the Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Michelangelo Museum, coming back Monday or Tuesday morning because we got a screenplay, and met a filmmaker at Sundance, and we have the exclusive rights to Robert Mapplethorpe’s life story and we’re making a biography on Robert Map­plethorpe and the curator of the museum in Florence invited us to come see this exhibit before it closes. So we get to get on a plane and go do that.

It’s also awesome you’re doing that Emmy weekend.

I didn’t get nominated. [laughs] Gifting suite or Michelangelo Museum?

Tell us about it and who’s playing in it.

It’s a biopic and it’s my brother Nate, whose audition I fell at when I was nine, he went on to NYU, studied, was in film school there, and he’s just led an extraordinary life of his own. He’s a really talented dude and he physically has a resemblance to Map­plethorpe that’s uncanny. And it’s so exciting that we have this filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, who did Dig! and We Live in Public, two-time Grand Jury Prize winner [directing]. This is her first feature.

“Dollhouse” airs Fridays at 10PM on FOX.