Dollhouse Crew Faces the Fans
Posted by bob in Films, News on July 27th, 2008
The show won’t be on the air until January at the earliest but that didn’t stop rabid fans from filling Hall H to hear Joss Whedon, Eliza Dushku and Tahmoh Penikett hold forth on their Fox series Dollhouse.
Whedon opened the talk by admitting to a long-standing man-crush on Penikett. The Battlestar Galactica star now will play an FBI agent who gets close to Dushku’s character, Echo, but the distance grows each time she portrays a new character.
Dushku recounted, again, the origins of the series, which has a seven episode commitment from the network. She then said Whedon “makes the words party on the page.” Whedon “fully puts me at ease and its fun work and fun livin’.”
When asked to compare Faith and Echo, Dushku told the questioner, “Echo we don’t know much about. We’re trying to figure that out, and she’s a different person in every show. I might bring some fury and funny to it.”
Whedon added, “Faith and Echo both have a lot of pain to go through. Eliza’s good with pain and crazy.”
Dushku the explained that she sends e-mails to Whedon, filling him in on her exploits and world travel but then she finds he incorporates those experiences into the next script. For her, the show can feel like a documentary.
The subject of the “bromance” confirmed he has completed his work on BSG and didn’t really want to discuss it for fear of crying on stage.
Penikett says he’s wrapped up shooting BSG and he doesn’t want to talk about it too much on stage because he might cry. He later discussed how nervous he was shooting his first scene with Dushku, blowing take after take.
Whedon addressed one would-be critic by saying, “This show is a little different — there is a fantastical premise, but it is modern-day and its people without vampires and spaceships. But you should know everything I do is about people. That’s what I tell stories about. Echo has a removable personality, she’s different people all the time, and she’s trying to figure out who she is between times. Each time she meets Tahmoh, she’s a new person and their relationship is really twisted. Every relationship on the show is going to be really twisted. Questions of identity are going to be twisted in ways I never have before, and it’s going to be really exciting.”
If there’s a connection between Dollhouse and Whedon’s first hit, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he says, “It’s probably a search for the soul. Vampires are considered unpeeled, and so are Actives. So it’s really about Echo’s search for her soul.”
As for the series itself, there may be singing, similar to the smash hit Dr. Horrible webisodes and yes, there may be additional Dollhouse material shot for webisodes in the future.
