Dushku's Experiences Inspired 'Dollhouse'

"When I moved out to L.A., I was 17," Dushku said in an interview at the Television Critics Association's summer press tour. Joss Whedon and she "were talking about sort of my experience and what it's like to sort of be a young woman in this business and that feeling, ... that universal theme, of ... you wake up every day and you feel like everyone wants you to be a different person. And you're trying to, like, figure [it] out. It's like this identity crisis."

Dushku, who has a production deal with the Fox, started her career in such films as "True Lies," and Whedon's TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel." She later starred in Fox's short-lived "Tru Calling." After another series called "Nurses" failed, she asked Whedon for advice when trying to develop her own series.

While having lunch with Dushku, Whedon immediately came up with the idea of a woman with multiple temporary personalities and wound up developing the series with her, even though he had no intention of returning to series television before that.

In "Dollhouse," Dushku plays a woman named Echo, a member of a group of people known as "Actives" or "Dolls." The Dolls have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas, including memory, muscle memory, skills, and language, for different assignments.

The mysterious organization which controls them then hires them out for secret missions. At the end of each mission, their memories are wiped clean again, but Echo begins remembering things, and her own personality begins to emerge.

"Joss really gets women," Dushku said. "There's a woman somewhere deep inside of him. And so that's sort of what we just started talking about: the challenge of that and what we face, what I face, in our culture today. And, with that, he went to the bathroom, and when he came back, he said, 'The show will be called 'Dollhouse.' And I was like, 'OK. I'm in.' And so here we are."

Talk about this story