Kicking vampiric ass as Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, waving her pom-poms in Bring It On or travelling backwards in time to try and prevent murders from occurring on Tru Calling just seems like another day in the life of Eliza Dushku.
Whether she’s tapping into her dark side or playing someone a little lighter, all of it is somehow related to who she is as a person at any given moment.
“It depends on what comes up, where I am and what I’m giving off,” says Dushku in this interview conducted at the time of Tru Calling. “Sometimes they seem to be different manifestations of my different personalities. I think we all do have interesting people in us. I try to mix it up, keep it fun, keep it real, keep it interesting. But it’s always a circumstance where the grass is greener. When you’re on a comedy, you’re like, ‘I need to do something serious.’ I was doing The New Guy and City by the Sea pretty much simultaneously. It was night and day. The characters were so different. It makes it fun and kind of interesting. For me, I think I have to see a street-wise element to the character. I like to see intelligent young women in roles and as characters. I gravitate towards that street-wise element.”
Although she has appeared in a number of films, it was the role of Faith on Buffy that truly allowed Dushku to start discovering aspects of herself.
“Buffy really came out of the blue,” offers the 22-year-ol Boston, Massachusetts native. “I mean, it had been two years since I ha worked. Sarah Michelle Gellar and I have an agent and manager in common, and so I had met her probably years before. I originally went on for five shows in season three an then they kind of came up and said, ‘Would you be the villain this season?’ and I’m going, ‘Yeah, that would be amazing. I knew that it would be a fun job to take on and by that point I knew that I loved working with those people. So I stayed on and just through the writers and I, we just kin of created this character that the fans really responded to. And for me, it was almost like a little bit of therapy. When I first started playing Faith, I had just graduated high school. I was 17-years-old, I moved away from the first time All of a sudden I’m out of the house and I’m moving out to LA. I was actually enrolled to a university before I got Buffy and I had to withdraw. And high school was hell in a way. It was so hard. I went to public school in Boston after having been an actress since I was 10 years old, so I had that element of just being different in an environment where any kind of difference you have makes you kind of an outcast and an automatic target."
For the rest of the interview as well as the videos and photo gallery, just head over to Earth's Mightiest by clicking the image below.