L i b r a i r i e . . .

P r e m i e r e . . .

E l i z a  D u s h k u . . .

By Lauren Waterman

The sultry young star of The New Guy and City by the Sea is good at acting bad.

For a young actor to claim to have “fallen” into film is something of a cliché - many say so as a catchall to describe the various ways a PYT is granted a foothold in the industry. Discovered while deejaying Gwynnie’s birthday party ? Spotted in a high school locker room by a director scouting the location ? Inevitably, they’ll gloss over any subsequent striving and say that they just “fell into it,” as though building a career in Hollywood were no different than stumbling down a rabbit hole.
So it’s refreshing to hear Eliza Dushku say she fell into acting and mean it literally. She fell. That’s what she did. At ten, she tagged along with her brother on a commercial audition, and when she tripped on the stairs and came up with a bloody nose, she did exactly what any born star would do. “I turned into instant drama queen,” she says with a smile, “crying and screaming, and everyone was like, ‘Who’s the kid ?’ ”

Little Eliza began going on her own auditions and promptly snagged parts opposite big stars in That Night and True Lies. But it wasn’t until Dushku - officially all grown up after breaking from the biz to finish high school - played a bad-seed slayer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer that her career really started to roll. Since then, she’s been a cheerleader with a bad attitude in Bring It On, a badass jewel thief in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and just plain bad in Soul Survivors. She attributes the typecasting to her tomboyish tendencies (she grew up outside of Boston with three older brothers) and her (for Hollywood) exotic looks. “People see the dark chick as the toughie, in contrast to the good, blond-haired, blue-eyed, hands-folded-in-her-lap kind of girl.” Or it could be that she’s just too good at going wrong on-camera. Whatever it is, she emphatically breaks the mold in this month’s The New Guy, playing a “pretty, perky, sweet girl.” She smiles mock-angelically and continues, “I wanted to do one for Grandma.”

Hopefully, one will be enough, because in April she’s back to the dark side, playing the recovering-addict mother of Robert De Niro’s grandson in Michael Caton-Jones’s City by the Sea. The three first worked together on This Boy’s Life, when Dushku was 12, so, she says, “they took on the role of my estranged uncles. The first day [on City by the Sea], I walked in like, ‘Hi, Bob !’ and he put his hand on his head and said, ‘God, I feel old.’ ” (The 21-year-old calls De Niro both “the ultimate teacher” and, more mischievously, “an easy target.”) Method acting wasn’t really an option for Dushku, as she was filming The New Guy simultaneously : She recalls arriving on the City set with “manicured nails and perfect hair,” only to have Caton-Jones exclaim, “Jesus, would you get a pimple or something ?” She settled on an abbreviated regimen of cigarettes and heroin documentaries on the nights before she shot her scenes. It seems likely that that was enough - a girl who can parlay a busted face into a film career without really trying could probably do just about anything she puts her mind to.