It was quite a lunch.
Actress Eliza Dushku and writer/producer Joss Whedon, Dushku's longtime pal, got together in Los Angeles for what the actress calls a "life-session sit-down." And when lunch finally ended, close to dinner time, Dushku -- who had played the butt-kicking Faith on Whedon's shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Angel (1999-2004) -- and Whedon had hatched their latest collaboration, Dollhouse.
"I wanted to see what he was working on, tell him what I was working on," Dushku said, speaking by telephone from the Los Angeles set of Dollhouse. "I'd met with Fox and we'd talked about developing a show together. I wasn't locked into anything, but I wanted to do something and I always have Joss in the back of my mind. So that's when I called Joss and took him to lunch.
"We were feeling each other out and talking about life and all the different masks I'd been in in the 17 years of my career," she recalled. "We talked about so many things. We've had such a strong friendship and such a strong connection, and we find so many of the same things thought-provoking. We're both feminists. We're artists, but we're communicators, and we find similar things relevant and important.
"Four hours into our lunch," Dush-ku continues, "we had come up with the core of Dollhouse, of what it'd be like to have a young woman put in all these different scenarios, have all these multiple personalities and all these skins. But, at the end of the day, who is she? And that parallels ‘Who am I? Who is Eliza? What makes you you in the hustle-bustle of the world around us?'"
Whedon eventually took a bathroom break and, when he returned, he dubbed the show Dollhouse. A week later, Dushku recalls, he sent her a formal, written pitch, which they elaborated on before presenting themselves to Fox network executives as a producing tandem. Fox went for it, and the resulting show will premiere at 9 p.m. Friday.
Dushku plays Caroline, a woman with a troubled past who agrees to participate in an illegal, underground program in which people, referred to as "Actives," let their personalities be erased and regularly replaced with other personalities. Caroline becomes Echo, who lives in a facility called the Dollhouse and takes on a variety of missions, assuming the persona of an assassin, a corporate negotiator and so on.
The problems start, however, when Echo begins to retain memories from mission to mission. And Caroline seems to still be in there too, somewhere.
"When every episode begins," Dushku said, "I'm sort of this empty shell, but the idea is that the mind wipes don't ever truly erase Caroline's soul. And my awareness starts to come through. Echo starts glitching and she gets these flashes of who she is and who she's been.
"You'll see a little bit of Caroline's pre-Active life in every show," she continued. "Then, by Episode 6 and 7, Caroline's back story really gets explored. And here we are now, shooting the last two episodes of the 13, and it's all out in the open. We really give you, in flashbacks and future pieces, an idea of who Caroline was, why and how she got there, and how the whole thing came to be."
Dushku describes her Dollhouse experience as something resembling repertory theater: Each week, though working with the same crew in the same surroundings, she's playing a different character, with different costumes, attitudes, temperaments and so forth.
"I, myself, am like this ADHD kid," the actress said. "I've traveled the world with my mother. I have three big brothers. I'm always on the move. I'm interested in people. I'm interested in hearing people's stories, in sharing my stories. That's my drug.
"So to come in every day and put on different outfits and different skins is so exciting and so me," she said.
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