MoviesOnline: Eliza, can you talk a little about what you’re doing now? I know you’re doing Dollhouse with Joss Whedon and that starts next month, doesn’t it?

Eliza: We air Friday, the 13th of February. It’s awesome. We’re on episode 7 of 13 and I’ve already played 20 something different characters and underneath these clothes I’ve got bruises galore. I’m so proud of them. I’m riding motorcycles, bow hunting, rock climbing, river rafting, moi thai fighting 6’5” dudes, like just everything.

MoviesOnline: Did doing Buffy help you with the martial arts part of that?

Eliza: We have the same stunt coordinator, Mike Gunther. He’s awesome and he was also on Angel so I’ve had 6-page fight scenes that I did with him years ago. Yeah, it helped, but even on Buffy I was kind of like that crazy 17-year-old kid that showed up on Buffy and I grew up with three older brothers and I showed up from Boston and said “I know you have a stunt double here for me but how much can I do? I want to fight. I want to get into it.” And they would just teach me the stuff and that, to me, is really fun. It’s really exciting.

MoviesOnline: So the premise is you’re playing 20 different people?

Eliza: It’s about a group of people that can be imprinted with any personality basically for hire.

MoviesOnline: Does your personality totally change?

Eliza: Yeah. We’re human beings that volunteer for five years of our life. As the story unfolds, there are dollhouses all over in cities around the world and there are these underground private organizations that take people, wipe their personalities clean, and house them in these beautiful, Japanese Zen garden/underground dorm lab and then they put us in a chair and literally put a wedge in the chair and can imprint us to be anything that anyone wants – fantasies, bank heists…

MoviesOnline: It sounds like an actor’s dream come true.

Eliza: Yeah. The last episode they surgically implanted cameras into my eyeballs and sent me into a cult compound as a blind woman. It was cool.

MoviesOnline: Do you have a single injury that’s your biggest badge of honor at this point?

Eliza: Yeah, my neck that I can’t turn. [laughs] I have a really good bruise right here (points to her leg) and a really good one right here (shows her arm) that I’ve been showing off a lot.

MoviesOnline: With Twilight being such a big hit, the rumor mill is buzzing about the possibility of a Buffy movie. Is that just fans’ wishful thinking or has there been real talk about it?

Eliza: I can give you Joss’ number and you can call him. [laughs] He’s over on the lot right now. I don’t know.

MoviesOnline: Would you ever want to go back and play it again?

Eliza: You never know. That’s what I’ve learned. I mean that show is just such an international phenomenon. There are like college courses now that dissect the world of Buffy. It’s just a testament I think to what an extraordinary creative genius Joss is and I just love the guy. He’s a hardcore feminist, he’s funny, he’s dramatic, he’s twisted, and he’s just dear. He’s my friend and my hero and people gag because we get really lovey dovey.

MoviesOnline: Did you ever do the conventions or anything like that?

Eliza: Yeah, girl. I did. [laughs] And people would show up and be like hey, can we take a picture of our matching face tattoos, and I’d be like, uh, that was a decal. And you watch the color drain from people’s faces and they’d be like I got that tattoo so we could be lifelong sisters and I’m like, sorry. They’d show up with vampire teeth and stuff.

MoviesOnline: After you film the 13th episode of Dollhouse, are you going to be looking at film scripts to try to squeeze in during a potential hiatus?

Eliza: I just launched a production company with my brother. It’s called Boston DIY Productions and we have 3 films that we’re about to do, one of which is with Randy and Jody. The first one is going to be a biopic on Robert Mapplethorpe and my brother is going to play Robert and we have an awesome cast and an amazing filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, who did a documentary called Dig! It won at Sundance a few years ago. She has another movie that just got accepted at Sundance. She’s just awesome. So we’re going to do Mapplethorpe. Jody is actually going to direct and they’re going to write this movie we’re doing together. Then I have a big budget, working class Lara Croft crazy studio thing we’re going to do too.

MoviesOnline: How are you enjoying being a producer and taking a break from acting?

Eliza: It’s nice because it gives you something else to do. As an actress, sometimes you go to your trailer and you’re like what do I do? Do I watch Tyra Banks on TV or what? Boredom is just not an option now. I mean it’s really cool. And I’m also a producer on Dollhouse because Joss and I basically put the thing together. I never really wanted to be an actor. I kind of tripped and fell into it and it gives me a chance to feel like I’m doing more than just being…I get to be involved in more of the machine and the operation and yeah, like walking into a room, there’s a different kind of confidence when you feel like you’re actually a part of, as opposed to being rated. So that’s cool. I love it.

http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_16008.html

TVGuide.com: How are things looking for Fox's Dollhouse? [The sci-fi thriller stars Dushku as Echo, an "Active" who has covert mission-specific personalities imprinted on her.]

Dushku: Awesome. We have all these rumors going around [in the wake of a production stoppage], and yet we're on Episode 7 out of our initial 13. We've made some changes.

TVGuide.com: Hey, it's totally fine to stop and catch your breath and do things right.

Dushku: Completely. And we feel like we're in an awesome groove. The scripts are tight and exciting, and we've definitely upped the action. Initially, we were doing a lot of set-up, and Fox and Joss decided that we needed to have the some of the payoffs come sooner. As a result, I sashay to work every day! I know that sounds crazy, but I love it. I've played probably twenty-some different characters in the past couple months, and every one is a thrill. I've been riding motorcycles and deer hunting, I had a Muay Thai fight scene with a 6-foot-5 cop, I went river rafting, rock climbing.... The whole gamut.

TVGuide.com: When we spoke at the summer TCA (watch video), you told me you were bringing some "skills" of your own to the table. But it sounds like you've added a few.

Dushku: Yes, my "mad skills." [Laughs] Joss and I have been good friends over the years, and one of the things we laugh about is how I live a crazy life and am in 10 places at once. I'm a bit of a storyteller, so I share all these things and he puts them in the show. He joked at Comic-Con that this show is a bit biographical.

TVGuide.com: Should your and Joss' fans be worried by Dollhouse's Friday time slot?

Dushku: We're in the age of DVR, man. People watch what they want to watch, and we feel confident that we're going to bring [existing] fans and welcome new ones. The show is extraordinary. It's cool and it's hot and it's different. It's nice being paired with Sarah Connor Chronicles as a sort of female empowerment night. It takes a little bit of the pressure off [versus airing on Mondays], with 24 coming on after two years. I think the time slot gives us time to come on, air all of our shows and hook people. And I truly believe it will.

TVGuide.com: You obviously had certain expectations and things you were looking forward to with Dollhouse. But now that you're well into filming it, what has surprised you about the show?

Dushku: I've obviously played a lot of strong characters, but Joss, from the very beginning, said, "I also see a lot of vulnerability, and different shades of you that others maybe haven't seen." So I get these scripts and they're different for me. We had this joke where Joss put me in a '40s up-do and it totally threw me off. It just threw me off. [Laughs] He said, "Eliza, I have you figured out. Your comfort zone lies in your hair, and I'm going to take you out of your comfort zone as much as possible. I can throw you off a building or dump you in a river or have you get hit by a truck, and none of that fazes you. But a '40s up-do sends you spinning. So get ready, honey — I'm going to take you for a little adventure!"

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Eliza-Du...s-1000553.aspx

I Have Seen Dollhouse

My TiVo may be on life support, but the DVD player still works, and midseason TV is starting to come in fast and furious. Among the screeners I've received is a little show by some guy who did something about vampires once. You don't want to hear anything about it yet, do you? I didn't think so. Ignore me as I write more after the jump.

OK, a little preface. I've watched the Dollhouse episode (given the history of remakes on this show, I don't know whether I can properly call it the "pilot") once, casually, without taking notes. I reserve the right to change my mind after I've watched it and marinated on it more. And I wasn't crazy about Firefly when it first debuted, in retrospect one of the worse calls of my career.

It was both better and worse than I expected, in different ways. One of my concerns about it was that—given Joss Whedon's talent for making absorbing serials—the case-of-the-week nature of the show would make it harder to grow attached to. (I'm assuming that anyone who cares at this point knows the premise already, but in case I'm wrong: Eliza Dushku plays Echo, an "Active," which is a person who has agreed to let a secretive organization erase his or her original memories and personality and implant new ones in them for "assignments" involving rich clients.)

Yes, this is certainly Joss Whedon trying to do What People Think Works on Broadcast TV Today—the legendary serial-procedural hybrid. But the first episode—in which Echo is imprinted with a kidnapping-negotiator's personality to secure the return of a rich man's abducted daughter—is well enough written to be absorbing. Writing a crime hour doesn't seem like Whedon's thing, but the episode is tight, suspenseful, with intriguing psychological twists and flashes of Whedonesque humor.

And the more serial elements of the show seem promising, at least. At the same time, an investigator (Tahmoh Penikett, BSG's Helo) is looking into the rumored existence of the illegal "Dollhouse" where the Actives are housed. A scene with a skeptical colleague addresses head-on a basic implausibility of the premise: why the hell does a billionaire need to turn to some kind of bizarre sci-fi brianwashing whorehouse to get the perfect date, or the perfect crime investigator, or the perfect whatever, when they can perfectly easily go out and hire one who hasn't had their personality wiped? His response: when you have everything, you want something more—more exotic, more perfect, more specific. Not so persuasive on the surface, but if the show is well enough done, hopefully we won't care.

Now the minus. Dollhouse as conceived (a heroine plays a different "person" every week) is less a series concept than an actress' showcase, a sort of extreme version of an Alias undercover premise. (In fact, the reports of how the show was conceived have said that Dushku essentially broached the idea as a showcase.) And the actress being showcased is Eliza Dushku. Now, I have nothing against Dushku. I thought she was fine on Buffy. But she's not exactly Toni Collette (who's playing a multiple-personality case on Showtime's The United States of Tara, which I have not seen). Watching her inhabit her imprinted "personality"—a tough negotiator with secret vulnerabilities—I did not see her becoming another person. I thought: Oh, look! There's Eliza Dushku with glasses and her hair in a bun!

If it weren't for Whedon's pedigree, I'm not sure I'd be dying to see a second episode. But for me, the main draw now is not seeing Dushku become a different person every week, but getting to see Joss Whedon become a different writer every week.

http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2008/1...een-dollhouse/

CraveOnline: We're really excited about Dollhouse, so what can you tell us so far?

Eliza Dushku: One of the great things about Dollhouse and about Joss is that Joss has known me for 10 years. From when he met me on Buffy, he has said over and over that he, through being my friend, just has seen so many different sides of me and saw that according to him, I have some capacity to play all these different roles that other people wouldn’t necessarily envision me playing and he does, so he's given me this tremendous gift of this show where I get to play multiple characters every week. And it's so funny, the big joke is that he put me in a '40s up do for one episode and it tripped me out. He told me, he was like, "I have figured you out. Your comfort zone lies in your hair and I am going to take you out of your comfort zone as much as I can in this show. It's the craziest thing ever because I can throw you off a building or dunk you in the river or do all these things to you, and the one thing that makes you freak out is a '40s up do? Something's up there and I'm going to explore it." I love him for that.

CraveOnline: How much has it changed during from development to reshooting the pilot?

Eliza Dushku: There have been changes but it's all good. I think the first pilot we shot, and Joss is very honest and he gets on blogs and answers everybody's questions, he shot it in more of like a noir style. That wasn't really the way FOX envisioned it so it was his idea to reshoot the pilot, up the action definitely, up the stakes every episode.

CraveOnline: How do you like your Terminator lead in on Fridays?

Eliza Dushku: I think it's great. I think it's great. I think it's great for the show. All the rumors have been going about the Friday night slot but we have confidence that the show is going to strike people as extraordinary.

CraveOnline: We've got to see you kick some ass.

Eliza Dushku: And seeing me kick some ass you will. I have bruises all over my body. We have the same stunt coordinator from Buffy and Angel, this guy Mike Massa. He's awesome. He used to double David so we've done these fight scenes. Like we've spent weeks fighting, just beating each other senseless.

CraveOnline: What other cool stunts are you doing?

Eliza Dushku: I've played 20-something different characters because I play different characters every week because we're imprinted with these personalities. I ride motorcyles and bow-hunt and river raft and do all these crazy things on a daily basis. It's just awesome.

CraveOnline: Since it's TV, how much time do you get to train for those crazy things?

Eliza Dushku: An hour. It's like the day before. He'll say, "I'm going to throw you off a roof," and I'm like, "Cool, let's do it!"

CraveOnline: What is the challenge of playing all these characters?

Eliza Dushku: It's perfect for me, because I have three older brothers and our whole family sort of has ADHD. We've always been sort of go-with-it, it's much better for me than wearing the same lab coat every day.

CraveOnline: Are there any personalities or activities you're trying to get written into the script?

Eliza Dushku: We're really trying to get Fox to approve a story about boy soldiers in Liberia, but we don't know how we're going to shoot that. And Fox finds it a bit disturbing and racy, but we're pushing for it.

CraveOnline: You started your own production company. How are you choosing roles now?

Eliza Dushku: My mother is a great storyteller and I grew up with that. My mother loves people and my mom's a political science professor. From when we were really young, we traveled the world with my mother. She was a single mom with four kids. She wanted us to travel so she used to agree to chaperone groups of students to different countries around the world in the event that she could always bring a kid for free. She's taken us through Africa and Russia before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We've been all over and wherever we go, she has this uncanny skill of just talking to people and sitting down with a miner in Romania and saying, "Tell me about your life" and getting people to share their stories. People just have fascinating stories and lives. I want to tell stories. I like to explore individuals and so with my production company, my first project is a biopic on Robert Mapplethorpe. My brother's going to be playing Robert because he's perfect for it. We have a great filmmaker and we're going to surround him with this really cool ensemble cast. Then Jody and I are going to do another project that's like a total female empowerment movie. It's sort of like Into the Wild meets I don't know. It's a story about this woman. Taking a person and exploring as much as you can in an hour and a half in the right kind of creative way is interesting to me, because people are interesting to me.

CraveOnline: You always covered a lot of different genres. Have you always had lots of choices?

Eliza Dushku: You know, I literally tripped and fell into the business. I tripped and fell at my brother's audition. I used to say it was just kind of dumb luck but I don't know. I was always as a kid sort of a mimic. I just would pick up on people and differences and then growing up in Boston with three big brothers, I definitely had the tomboy kind of tough girl thing going. I had this feminist mom and so I started out playing these strong young women. It kind of came naturally to me and then every year that I recover from middle school and high school I'm more comfortable with vulnerability and my sort of softer, feminine side and all the colors in between.

http://www.craveonline.com/articles/...nobel_son.html

Joss Whedon: Welcome To The Dollhouse

Joss Whedon is no stranger to success. After the phenomenally successfully Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, Whedon has treated viewers to the short-lived but well regarded Firefly (and subsequent movie Serenity) and the musical superhero spoof Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. His latest project is Dollhouse, which paints a future where “Actives” (or dolls) have their personalities wiped and reprogrammed in order to carry out different assignments. Abbie Bernstein caught up with Whedon to find out how the show came about.

What’s Dollhouse about?

It’s about a girl trying to figure out who she is, while she’s imprinted with every personality you can imagine. It’s about acting, living, being a woman, being everything. Let me put it this way – when I thought it up and launched it at Eliza [Dushku, who executive produces with Whedon and plays main character Echo], the first thing she said was, “Oh, my God, it’s my life!” And she meant mostly as an actress, but then we realized it didn’t just mean that.

It’s a metaphor for everybody. If it isn’t, you’re missing something. The idea is, we all have certain assumptions about who we are, based on what we were told when we were little and what we think we’re supposed to do. And we have a lot of assumptions about what is good, and what about us is not good, and what’s sinful and what’s saintly, and we’re often wrong about all of them. Dollhouse is basically about breaking all that down and exploring it and finding out what it really means to be a human being.

How did Dollhouse come into being?

To me, Eliza is like watching a meteor shower. I’m just amazed. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’ve known her for 10 years. She’s always been a star. But being a star and being a human being are two very different things. And over the 10 years, we’ve spent time becoming friends, but I’ve also watched her deliberately and painfully take control of her career and the way in which it’s going, the things she is portraying, and you don’t see that a lot.

I see it with Felicia Day doing The Guild on the internet, saying, “Nobody’s going to make my way, so I’ll make my own way,” and Felicia is smart enough to pull that off. The two of them share that. Eliza – when I first sat her down, years ago, to say, “Stop making bad movies!” she said, “We don’t set out to make them bad – I don’t know what to tell you.” But we talked about her agency, her choices. And it was a bleak landscape.

I seem to be the guy who spends his life saying how hard it is for beautiful young women – but it is hard to be an ingénue in this town. We got together a few years later, [but the people around her] insisted she do the big-budget thing, so nobody wanted to know what Eliza thought, except Eliza.

And when we got together for lunch this time, she was like, “I’ve made a deal, I don’t expect to write or control a show, but I do need to control the quality of what I’m doing and the image of what I am, and I want to make meaningful, decent, political, feminist, real, fun, sexy, interesting TV.” Those were all on her list. And I said, “There’s only one man for that job!” [laughs]

In the course of the conversation, the idea of Echo came to me from that exact thing. The story of Dollhouse is the story of somebody trying to figure out who she is while everybody tells her what they want her to be. That is the story of Eliza Dushku, and watching Eliza do that has been one of the great joys of my career. She’s always been an intellectual equal. She’s always been a seeker. I’m still trying to figure myself out.

That’s another point of the show, is that the people who control the Actives, the dolls, are just as much in need of understanding what they are as the dolls.

When you and the writing staff are creating personas for Echo, do you think, “Boy, this would be a really cool identity, but who on Earth would want them to do this and why?”

”Who would want them to do this and why?” is sort of what keeps it interesting every week. Sometimes it’s somebody extraordinarily nefarious and sometimes it’s somebody very decent, but usually, it’s all the way in between. I mean, as long as nobody gets hurt, as long as the Actives are not harmed, everything’s good, everything is game. Some people would abuse that and some people need it.

Ultimately, you’ll find the one thing that every episode has in common is that Echo is the person you need at that point in your life to either turn your life around, to give you the moment you thought you’d never have, or to pull you out of a place you think you can’t get out of. Or to rob the bank. Whatever it is, she’s a kind of life coach, without even meaning to be. She’s always the perfect person for whatever it is you need.

Sometimes there will be B stories – we’ll always see the workings of the Dollhouse, but we’ll also see other Actives on other engagements, and sometimes they’ll just be B stories, sometimes they’ll cross over or sometimes they’ll just connect thematically.

How did you determine who the other characters around Echo should be?

The first thing I said to Eliza, before I’d even created the show, was, “You need an ensemble. You can’t be in every scene – it’ll make you nuts. You need a genre show and you need a big ensemble. You need a premise that’s bigger than just you, so that if you need to stand down and get some rest, you can maintain after a certain time.”

To that end, there was more than one Active. Then you work out the idea of the place [the Dollhouse]. You need a programmer, you need someone who runs it, you need someone to back her up, her handler, and you need somebody to save her, who’s trying to find her.

Then Dr. Saunders, who’s played by Amy Acker, was created after I pitched the show. It was, “We need this voice in the Dollhouse, to counteract Topher the programmer.” So it was all very organic. It was just the obvious people that would be in Echo’s life. It wasn’t like, “I need my wacky sidekick.” There was nothing cynical about the way they came in – they were all just what they needed to be, and then I found the actors who had that same quality. I feel again that same thing I had on Firefly of, “These guys have always been doing this, nobody else could’ve.”

There’s a lot of anticipation about Dollhouse in the online fan community…

Sometimes there’s a backlash against fans – “Oh, they’re going to make everybody else not watch.” Well, that’s not the case. The only person who can really do that is me. If people come, if they give it a fair shake, I will do my best to entertain them. And everything else will fall by the wayside.

Can you say anything about Cabin in the Woods, the feature film you’re producing that Drew Goddard will direct?

It’s a horror movie. Some teenagers may meet with violence!

http://dwscifi.com/interviews/2847-j...-the-dollhouse

Vigils may already have started for Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" series following the announcement that it will occupy Fox's Friday night slot-of-death, but the show is not out for the count. Not by a long shot.

"The fact of the matter is that I've made some rookie mistakes – actually worse than rookie mistakes – about what I was doing with the show, especially considering that I've worked with Fox before," he told SFX. "Looking back I go, ‘Oh, of course they would have wanted this and I don't know why I thought they'd let me do that.' The hard part has been to find the show somewhere in between my intentions and their expectations; to still find the show that I wanted to make. We did that and now things are running smoothly, but whew, doggy."

Despite the story changes and slight re-tooling of the show, Whedon promises a solid adventure series that borrows from all genres as Echo (Eliza Dushku) slowly comes to terms with her own Humanity at the hands of an almost hostile agency determined to keep her nothing but a doll. And if he has his way, there will be a serialized element alongside the adventure-of-the-week formula.

"I don't enjoy a show that only gets you to watch the next one; where they're trying to come up with something more outlandish every five minutes. I've always believed in a show where every episode contains something that's resolved and the mythology surrounding that becomes what the audience is interested in regardless. Its legitimate for [the network] to say, ‘start out in this fashion where people can come on board anytime and then let the characters who inhabit the world take over the narrative gradually.' By Season 5 of ‘Buffy,' you have a lot of backstory you need to know, but compared to Season 1 it's much more fulfilling and mature. But you need people to get there."

When the series launches next year, there are high hopes – shared by both Whedon and his many fans – that the show will become a success. But according to Whedon, the success of a series isn't measured in the numbers it brings in on a weekly basis … it's the show's fans that count.

"I've had a similar thing happen on every single one of my shows, to a greater or lesser extent," Whedon said. "And in every case, the show that came out of it found an audience – even if it took being cancelled to do it. I'm aiming for the stars with this one – a show that runs for more than a year."

http://www.syfyportal.com/news425652.html

Espenson: Dollhouse Is Just Fine

Writer/producer Jane Espenson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) defended Joss Whedon's upcoming Fox SF series Dollhouse--on which she is a consulting producer--against negative buzz and rumors, saying that it's shaping up just fine, thank you.

"It's really good," Espenson said in an exclusive interview with SCI FI Wire. "I think it could very well appeal to not just Whedonites, but a much broader audience. I think it's extremely good, and the concept just blows me away: It's fantastic, this notion of people who have been erased and are now imprintable with whatever you want them to be. ... It's sci-fi of the most human kind. It's sci-fi about people, as opposed to, you know, phenomena. And I really love that."

Espenson also downplayed reports of production interruptions, a bad timeslot and network meddling, calling them "overblown."

"We are now rolling along glitch-free," Espenson said. "I think people are very confident now that everyone is on the same page with what the show is, how amazing it can be, and I think that a lot of this has been overblown. I mean, very, very often on Buffy we were sort of, 'Oh, we don't quite have that script ready.' That's sort of just how TV goes. It's just when it happens at the beginning like this that it gets a lot of attention, and I think that people were concerned that the Firefly scenario would play out again. But, you know, I think that we're very confident of what the show is, and yeah, it's moving along so smoothly now."

Espenson said that she is currently writing a first draft of her first solo script for Dollhouse, the 11th episode of the first 13 ordered by Fox.

How is Whedon holding up? "He seems happy and comfortable and delightfully amusing as always," Espenson said. "You can't get through a few minutes with him without laughing."

Espenson said that viewers will be pleasantly surprised by star Eliza Dushku's performance in the series. "I think people are going to be really, really impressed with Eliza's performance," she said. "In fact, this cast all the way through. We have this incredibly versatile cast that's just perfect for this kind of show, where people are playing, ... as they're being imprinted with different personalities, they're playing different characters. And and so part of the genuine fun and joy of the show is just watching, 'Oh, my God, look at who they are now.'"

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index...d=62851&type=0

Dollhouse's Dushku Reveals Roles

Eliza Dushku revealed a few of the personas her character will take on in Fox's upcoming SF drama Dollhouse, including one in which she'll do a bit of singing.

"I had to sing a few episodes ago, yeah," Dushku said on the red carpet for the Video Game Awards on Dec. 14. "And I had to lay down a track, so we'll see how it turns out [laughs]. We'll see if a musical is a good idea after that episode airs."

The last time I spoke to Dushku, she said that she'd love to be in a Joss Whedon musical, a la Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

In her Dollhouse ep, she said she sang "a cappella." "I was auditioning to be a backup singer for a big pop star in one episode," she said. "So it was like a gospel song I did."

Dushku's character, Echo, is a person whose mind is wiped and programmed with different personas by a top-secret underground agency, which then sends her on various missions.

Dushku said her favorite persona so far was a killer. "I like the assassin chick that I just did," she said. "She has a lot of layers. Hyper-intelligent, and I also got to beat up a big 6-foot, 5-inch stunt guy."

What was the hardest? "A serious, professional woman with an up-do," Dushku said. "That's hard for me. Joss is like, 'I know you by now. Your comfort zone lies in your hair. I can throw you off a building or hit you with a car or make you fight seven guys, but you get uncomfortable if I put your hair in an up-do.' That's kind of insane and kind of hilarious."

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index...d=62890&type=0

20th Century Fox TV Cuts Production Budgets

News Corp.-owned 20th Century Fox Television is implementing across-the-board production cuts at all of its series, joining a growing list of companies trimming budgets in the wake of the economic downturn.

All 20th producers have been told to reduce their budgets by 2%, a spokesman for the studio confirmed Tuesday. The move affects both existing hits such as “24” and “Family Guy” as well as newer shows such as “Life on Mars” and “Dollhouse”.

"In these challenging economic times, we've asked all of our showrunners to trim their production budgets by 2%, an assignment which they have all embraced,” a 20th spokesman said. “Everyone understands that revenues are down and these steps are necessary to protect our business."

The cuts at 20th follow ABC Studios’ decision to ask its producers to trim 2% from their respective budgets. NBC Universal and CBS Corp. also have recently undergone waves of layoffs in reaction to the gloomy economic climate.

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2008/12/2...cuts_produ.php