Whedon Unveils Dollhouse Origins
Joss Whedon, creator of the upcoming Fox SF series Dollhouse, told SCI FI Wire that he came up with the
show’s concept during a lunch meeting with star Eliza Dushku, a longtime friend and colleague, who played Faith in Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“It came from my conversation with Eliza about her, about her life, her career, about what everybody wanted from her, what they wanted her to become and what she was trying to become,” Whedon said in an interview last week during Fox’s upfront presentation to advertisers in New York. “That’s really what the show is about. It’s about plumbing the depths of our identity.”
Dollhouse stars Dushku as Echo, a member of an underground, illegal group of people who’ve had their personalities wiped clean, enabling them to be imprinted with any number of new personalities to carry out missions at the behest of their handlers. The people, called “Actives,” live in a spa-like facility called the Dollhouse, and everything seems to be going according to plan until Echo begins to experience self-awareness and feels compelled to uncover the truth about her identity.
“It’s sort of taking the role of a Frankenstein monster and saying, ‘Who am I? Who created me? Why am I like this? What’s good about me? What’s bad about me? What’s eternal about me? And what’s just evanescent?’” Whedon said. “And everyone in the show is dealing with that same issue, but for a different reason. That, to me, is the heart of the thing: ‘Well, who are we?’”
Fox has picked up Dollhouse for seven episodes. On a weekly basis, Whedon said, viewers will see Dushku as different characters. Echo will have a new engagement every week and, as a result, a new purpose and a new personality each week, too.
“The exciting thing–and part of the other reason I created the show–is that Eliza is very versatile, and this will be a chance for her to play 100 different people,” Whedon said. “They’ll all be her–she’s not going to wear old-person makeup or anything like that–but they’ll all be from very different social strata, with very different agendas and very different motivations and very different things. Every week [Echo] will have an agenda that’s evil or decent or sexual or romantic or altruistic. It can be anything.”
The show’s other characters include Adelle (Olivia Williams), a Dollhouse leader; Boyd (Harry Lennix), Echo’s handler; Topher (Fran Kranz), the morally ambivalent programmer who wipes the Actives’ memories; Dr. Claire Saunders (Amy Acker, late of Whedon’s Angel), a doctor who feels protective of the Actives; Paul Smith (Battlestar Galactica’s Tahmoh Penikett), an FBI agent inching closer to the Dollhouse; and Sierra (Aztec Rex’s Dichen Lachman) and Victor (Enver Gjokaj), Echo’s fellow Actives.
“There will be a flow-through of the show as well, about [Echo] and the characters surrounding her and how the Dollhouse works, how it doesn’t work, and her burgeoning self-awareness,” Whedon said. “Between these engagements, she’s this complete innocent and starts to go, ‘Hey, here I am in the Garden of Eden. What’s this apple, and what do I do with it?’” Dollhouse will premiere in early 2009. –Ian Spelling
