Just days before the premiere of her new series Dollhouse, Eliza Dushku talked with reporters about the demands and rewards of playing all kinds of characters in one show, plus her take on how the show evolved, its sexualized, provocative positioning, and what the future holds for Echo and the other dolls. See also: Joss Whedon's wide-ranging interview on the show's past, present, and future.
So far in the first three episodes, Echo has gotten an asthma attack, gotten hunted by a client and gotten wiped in the middle of a mission. What else can go wrong?
Anything and everything at any given time is sort of the point I think. We're dealing in real situations and that's why we have our handlers there, to hopefully protect us from the bad, but yes; each show I think that sort of thing is going to go down because it's obviously not a perfect system and it's not a perfect world.
Can you give us a hint of any more of those conflicts?
Well, I can tell you I enter a cult of the blind cultess and they send me in with cameras implanted into my eyes and some things go down there. I can tell you that there's upcoming contact with Agent Paul Ballard, who is Tahmoh Penikett, and there is going to be some charged stuff in those episodes.
How is the relationship with Sierra going to develop.
Sierra. I don't know. How much can I tell you? I don't know how much I'm allowed to give up. Again, we pick up in the Dollhouse and the dolls are starting to have these memories and develop these little flickers of self awareness and recognize one another and remember things from engagements. Of course, that's considered a glitch in the Dollhouse system and that's where all hell breaks loose. That's kind of where the show expands and that's where it gets interesting to me.
The fact that you're essentially a different character every episode, is that a large part of what interested you about the premise of the show?
Well, Joss and I came up with the show together and we were talking about what kind of show would suit me right now in my career and in my life. Basically, Joss and I have had a ten-plus-year friendship at this point and he knows me very well and he knows how hard it is for me to sit still for five minutes, not to mention for an entire episode, so the premise of the show was sort of based on my own life and on keeping things moving and on keeping me active and having the chance to play and jump around in between these characters every week and sometimes multiple times every show. That was planned from the get-go.
I just have a lot of energy and I just have sort of an appetite for people and stories and telling different stories and being in a different place and traveling and experiencing just different emotions. One thing that Joss gave me in this project is the ability to sort of show some other colors of mine that other creators and other writers, directors, executive producers haven't given me in the past, but he has seen them in me and wanted to give me the stage to act them out.
How has the show developed from that first meeting and that first kernel into what it actually became?
Well, when we first sat down I had just sort of negotiated a deal with Fox to ultimately come up with a show to do with them and Joss was really the only person on my mind. I thought if he wasn't going to do a show with me he at least knew me well enough to sort of guide me and to sort of help me put together the ideas that were in my head and to help me sort of figure out what kind of woman I wanted to play and what I wanted to be a part of. So when we sat down and we just started talking about life and talking about our careers and different projects, we're really like-minded people and we were talking about sort of what it's like for me, Eliza, waking up every day and having to somewhat be a different person every day and we were talking about the Internet and how people can get so much and with just the click of a button find anything that they want or need or desire or think that they want or need or desire and then what actually happens when they get that.
We were absolutely talking about sexuality and what's taboo and objectification and just things that are relevant to us. Four hours later Joss absolutely sort of sprang forward with the idea, with the basis for the show and said, "It will be called Dollhouse and it will be basically exactly this. It will be you with the ability to be imprinted to be someone sexy or to be anything or to be objectified every week or multiple times a week and how that affects people. We're going to stir people up and we're going to make people uncomfortable because that's sort of interesting to us."
Here we are 13 episodes later and we think we've done that. I mean the first show on Friday we're super excited about. I love "Ghost." I love "Target." I love the first three, four, five episodes, but the cool thing is the show gets better even from there. I mean Joss is really a novelist and you have to give him chapters to tell the story. He and the other writers just -- I participated on a lot of levels as producer also with ideas of my own. I mean the show just goes so deep and it's so exciting and so thought provoking and relevant.
We changed the pilot for sort of more logistical reasons. I think that any time you're dealing with a lot of cooks in the kitchen and FOX had sort of an idea of a pace that they wanted in the first show or in the first couple of shows. It maybe differed from how Joss originally wanted to set it up, but I think that absolutely Joss and I both feel that where we came out is exactly what we had talked about when we sat down at the first meal when the idea first came up. We're telling this young woman's story and following her and following these others as they go through these first 13 trials of engagements and of self realization and identity.
