Tru Faith by Ian Spelling
It’s no big secret that we’re all massive Faith fans here at Titan Towers, so we’re thrilled that we finally managed to track actress Eliza Dushku down to talk about her final experiences on Buffy and Angel. Five by Five!

You’ve just gotta have Faith. Eliza Dushku promised that she’d find some time for an interview with the official Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine, but right now everyone wants a chunk of her increasingly limited time. She’s started production on her new series, Tru Calling, which is filmed in Canada. And today, she’s in Los Angeles attempting to juggle meetings with FOX, who will launch Tru Calling, several pending interviews and a magazine photo shoot. This very instant, in fact, she’s sitting in a chair as a make-up artist and hair stylist dab, tease and primp her to perfection. True to her word, however, Eliza finds time to chat. And chat she does, for a full half-hour, albeit with frequent pauses – caused by a blow dryer – and apologises for those pauses.
    First on the agenda is Eliza’s new gig, Tru Calling. The upcoming series casts the raven-haired actress as Tru Davies, a young woman with a special gift/curse: she can relive any day. As such, Tru can turn back the clock and prevent murders, suicides and accidents from ever happening. And working in a morgue provides Tru with plenty of opportunities to try her hand at playing God, an activity that could backfire if saving one life costs others theirs. Tru also spends way too much of her time coming to the aid of her siblings, gambler Harrison (played by Shawn Reaves) and drug addicted Meredith (Jessica Collins). “What intrigued me about the show?” Eliza asks, repeating the question posed to her. “It was everything, really; the script, obviously, right of the bat, and the people involved. I’d been familiar with some of the things that they’d done. It was the whole package. I just figured, why not go for it? And right now, with Buffy having ended, there aren’t a lot of shows out there with a female heroine. Maybe people would be missing one, and I think that these kinds of shows are almost like therapy for teenage girls and young girls going through kind of what’s up in their own lives. So, I think that it’s important to have there.”

    The pilot includes a line of dialogue that’s sure to provide knowing chuckles from members of the Buffy fanbase. At one point, Tru looks at her brother and says, “Have a little faith in your sister.” Eliza laughs when that particular nugget is brought to her attention. “I don’t know how that got in there,” she says. “I think that it wasn’t even meant to be a joke and then it just kind of happened. And now, obviously, it comes across as in an in-joke. It’s funny because a lot of people have kind of given me grief. I’ve got Buffy fans saying, ‘I really loved Faith,’ and they’re upset I didn’t do more or a spin-off series. I loved the show and I loved the characters and the crew and I loved what we created there, but I wanted to do something different. I started playing Faith probably five years go, and when you’re in a new show – that can run seven years – I thought ‘I don’t know. I want to do something maybe a little different.’ I also didn’t want to be following in Buffy‘s footsteps and being compared to that the whole time. So, I hope that people can grow along with me and appreciate this new character I’m playing.”
    All of that makes perfect sense, but some people still might wonder about Eliza’s choice of material. Not Tru Calling‘s quality or prospects, but rather that now seemed as good a time as any for her to pursue a film career. Remember, she managed to squeeze in six movies before, during and after her stints on Buffy and/or Angel. Also Tru Calling definitely falls into the genre realm, and some might assume that she’d seek a comedy or romance or straight drama. Eliza sees no reason to second-guess her decisions. “I just felt like I had done a number of movies in the past couple of years,” she notes. “Movies are great, and you get to move and you get to go shoot here and there, but at the same time, I was also feeling like, ‘Well, maybe I want something where I’ll have my home nearby and I’ll know where I’m going to work every day.’ I kind of wanted something like that, and I just felt like, ‘Why not?’ I’m 22 years old, and if the show were to go six years, I’d be 28 when it ended. It just seemed like it was in my gut. Also, the bar between television and film has really been lifted with really great shows like Sex and the City. If the writing is there, I don’t think that it’s looked down on as much as it was in the past, when would go, ‘Oh, TV is B-acting and films are A-acting.’ I feel like a lot of the TV out there on the air right now is almost better than the stuff on film. So, I wasn’t really concerned with people going,  ‘Oh, television.’”.
    Buffy the Vampire Slayer will no doubt go down in history as a television classic. And as Faith, Eliza was a huge part of the show’s heart, soul and success. Over the years, she kicked ass, displayed sass, battled against and alongside Buffy, matured and evolved. Her most recent, and perhaps last, stint as Faith began late last winter when Eliza turned up in three fourth-season episodes of Angel, namely ‘Salvage,’ ‘Release,’ and ‘Orpheus’. “Oh, I loved it,” she enthuses. “David Boreanaz is my man. He’s my boy, and we just have so much fun. We really just hit it off from the beginning, way back when, and I really love going and working with those guys. People always ask what made me go back, and it’s because it’s so fun and the writing is always 100 per cent, 150 per cent, and it’s just such a pleasure. David and I goof off and then, when we get a dramatic scene, he’s really, really great fun to play off. You want to surround yourself with good people and that’s exactly what I know I’m doing when I go over there. And I thought the way they got Faith out of prison was cute. ‘Step away from the glass.’ I thought that was good. It was strong and it was kind of crazy and I thought that it was just right.” 

    Following her trio of Angel engagements, Eliza wended her way over to Buffy for it’s final five episodes. As the last arc played out, Buffy seemed unable to reach out to, or win the confidence of, the Potential Slayers. They considered her too serious, too insular and intractable, and, in fact, they – with the approval of Giles, Dawn and the rest of the Scooby Gang – essentially appointed Faith as their leader. And even as she led the troops, she found time to romance Principal Wood, a burgeoning relationship that got its pay-off with the touching, then amusing moment when he appeared to die, only to cough and recover. “I was just excited to go back and be there because the show was a phenomenon and it is a part of history,” she agrees. “I had no idea how they were going to end it, but I assumed that Joss would pick a fun thing and I was so impressed with the way that it was cast off. I remember getting the last script and thinking ‘How is he going to do this? How do you end something like that?’ And then, by the last page, I was like, ‘Oh, like that! That’s how you do it.’ The way he writes, there’s just so much blood in each character. The Faith-Wood relationship was good. He was fine She was used to being this girl who had her boy toys, but they started to connect and by the end of it, I thought that they had a really nice connection.” And no, Eliza adds, she never for a moment thought Faith would be among the familiar faces kicking the bucket. “I hadn’t heard any word on that, and so, no, I wasn’t too concerned.” she says. “I figured if he was going to kill me, Joss would have let me in on the secret early on.”
    Waves of emotional highs and lows washed over the Buffy production  team during it’s last few weeks. For a time it appeared that the show might return for an eighth season. For a period it looked as if a spin-off of some nature might come together. Then, finally, the show’s fate was decided. It was to end; there’d be no next season nor any spin-off featuring Faith, Spike or anyone else (for the time being anyway). Eliza reports that once the decision came down she picked up a we-see-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vibe bouncing around the Buffy set. “It was just such a mixture of emotions because they really are a family, through all of the good and the bad,” she explains. “They were together for seven years and that’s a lot. I think that they were ready to go, but at the same time, they were leaving their family. So, I think that it was joyful and also sad at the same time.
    “I’m really proud of them all. Every time that I got back there I’d feel like I was going back and seeing my high school again, because we’d all been such good friends over the years. I’ll miss not being able to go back and shoot with them, but they really turned it out for the finale and they worked their asses off, and I’m just really proud of all of it.”
    Of course, the BuffyVerse being the BuffyVerse and with the Angel gang still cranking it out over on the WB, there’s no reason to think they won’t call upon their old Buffy friends to make guest appearances on Angel. Eliza knows full well that that’s a genuine possibility. “I would never rule that out,” she says. “I mean, I love it, playing Faith. It’s so much fun and, absolutely, if they’d have me and if time permits, then, I’d love to go over and do some of that stuff again on Angel.”