Eliza Dushku’s friendship with Joss Whedon began at the Arsenal Mall.
That Watertown mall is where she went when she was 17 years old to make an audition tape for Whedon’s series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Whedon cast her as rogue slayer Faith off that tape and Dushku flew to Los Angeles.
Ten years later, the two friends were having lunch at the Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica, Calif., when they hatched up a plan for Whedon’s latest series, “Dollhouse.”
“We were eating gouda pizza and we were just sitting and talking about life and talking about his kids and what is relevant to us in our lives and what’s important to us and what we watch and what we would like to watch,” Dushku said during an interview on the “Dollhouse” set. “And just the fact that people can click on the Internet and get anything they want. You can have so much control, but they are so much out of control. Joss went to the bathroom and when he walked back, he sat down and said, ‘It will be called “Dollhouse.” ’ ”
In the series, slated to premiere in January on Fox, the Boston native plays Echo, an agent for hire who in each episode has her memory and personality wiped clean. “Joss said basically, ‘You are what anyone wants you to be, and I know that in your own life, that’s what you’re dealing with. You’re at a place in your career where everyone is wondering what you’re going to do next and why you’ve made certain decisions, and everyone wants you to be a different person every day.’
“This is a personality playground for me. It is the ultimate role because I get to put on a different skin each day,” the actress said.
Dushku, who also starred in the Fox series “Tru Calling,” said she realized after “Buffy” and its spinoff, “Angel,” ended how rare her relationship with Whedon was.
“I realized what I had when it was gone, and that was a very important lesson for me to learn in my career. It’s very, very hard to be under the control of a show creator or a studio that wants your character to do something that you just don’t feel comfortable doing or you don’t understand why they’re doing it, and maybe they’re conforming to mainstream or all the cooks in the kitchen at the studio. With Joss, the executives have such respect for him that he really has that creative freedom to make the good stuff.”
The youngest daughter of two educators (her father taught at the Curley School and her mother is a professor at Suffolk University), Duskhu said she tries to get back home whenever she can.
“I feel like a lot of actors don’t know where their home is, but I’ve always felt really lucky to feel like I have a home and I have a community and I feel support from Bostonians,” she said. “I can drive through on the Mass Pike and go through the toll booth and people are like, ‘Hey, Eliza, welcome home.’ It’s really fantastic. I’m really embraced by Boston, and that feels really good and always lets me know that no matter what happens out here in Hollywood, I always have a home to go back to. That’s the most important thing to me.”
