Eliza Dushku, who stars in the new Joss Whedon produced series Dollhouse, brings to the role a decade and a half of experience of playing women in peril who manage to hit back at peril with great alacrity and skill.
Eliza Dushku is first remembered in her role as Dana Tasker, the young, teenage daughter of Harry and Helen Tasker, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, in James Cameron’s great film about espionage, terrorism, and family True Lies. Eliza Dushku’s great sequence was when she was captured by the evil Islamic terrorists who propose to blow up Miami with a nuclear weapon. (Yes, in 1994, a movie was actually made in which Islamic terrorists were the bad guys.) Eliza Dushku’s character manages to grab the key to the nuclear weapon, escape her captors, and climb up a crane on the roof of the building pursued by the evil, Islamic terrorist. Then came the fantastic sequence when daddy showed up at the controls of a Harrier jump jet rescue his little girl.
Eliza Dushku’s next role was that of Faith, the evil slayer in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and later, as a reformed evil vampire slayer, in Angel. Eliza Dushku’s Faith was not so much the woman in peril as that she was the peril, to vampires, to Buffy, to Buffy’s friends, and to just about everyone else. Coming from an abusive background, Faith is damaged and turns evil. Her peril is more of the spiritual kind, in a way, than the physical kind. Faith and Buffy battled it out through a series of episodes until she is eventually convinced by Angel, Buffy’s good, vampire lover to face up to the consequences of her actions and turn herself into the police. Later, when Faith is needed to deal with Angel, who has reverted to his evil self, Angelus, she breaks out of prison. Later she rejoins Buffy to fight against the final evil in season seven.
Next, Eliza Dushku stared in a two season series called Tru Calling. In Tru Calling, Eliza Dushku played Tru Davies, who worked on the night shift of the local morgue. From time to time, a corpse seems to wake up and say, “Help me”, whereupon Tru finds herself transported back in time at the beginning of the same day with the task of saving the dead person from dying.
Now Eliza Dushku has a new role in the upcoming TV series, Dollhouse, produced by her old Buffy and Angel cohort, Joss Whedon. The premise of Dollhouse is that there is a secret and slightly illegal organization which a group of people called “Dolls” or “Actives” who have had their minds wiped. When someone is needed for a job, as an assassin, a spy, a sexual companion, or any other role, the “Doll” is imprinted with the memories and skills necessary to carry out the job. The job having been accomplished, the “Doll” is mind wiped again and put into storage until the next time.
Eliza Dushku’s character, Echo, is a “Doll” whose original memories are starting to inexplicably return. She is becoming self aware again and that could pose a danger. Dollhouse is scheduled to air of Fridays with a thirteen episode commitment.
Source: Eliza Dushku, IMDB
