The film: "Bring It On" (PG-13; language).
The stars: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union.
Behind the scenes: Directed by Peyton Reed. Written by Jessica Bendinger. Produced by Marc Abraham, Thomas A. Bliss and John Ketcham. Released by Universal Pictures.
Running time: One hour, 35 minutes.
Playing: Citywide.
Our rating: 3 1/2 stars

Popularity. It can be a double-pointed stake.

At 19, Eliza Dushku has got that lesson down. The Boston-bred actress has certainly seen her pop culture profile spike in the last two years as her recurring role as Faith -- a vampire-slayer gone bad -- on the "Buffy" and "Angel" television shows has made her a teen icon. Her movie career is heating up, too, with a co-starring role in the cheerleading comedy "Bring It On" the latest example.

But success comes with complications. The darkly attractive, smokey-voiced Dushku, an exuberant college professor's daughter who shares an L.A. home with one of her big brothers, is already having to counter "bad girl" stereotyping. And while fans of the WB's horror dramas have mostly been idolizing, there are the few, she acknowledges, "who are so far into the fantasy aspects of the show that they get in my face with, 'Who do you think you are, trying to start something with Buffy? You think you're tough?' And I'm like, 'No! I'm just an actress.'

"And the letters from prison are lovely, too, let me tell ya," she adds with a nervous laugh.

"Bring It On," of course, is all about the popularity issue in its purest, most ritualized form. The film stars Kirsten Dunst as the new captain of a championship high school cheerleading squad and Dushku as Missy, a transfer student who only joins the pep contingent because the school doesn't have a program for her real specialty, gymnastics.

"The character of Missy was really important for the movie because she represents the audience's point of view about cheerleading," explains "Bring It On" director Peyton Reed. "She comes in very skeptical of that world and very cynical, and Eliza has a certain tough, tomboyish quality that was the furthest thing away from a cheerleader, which was perfect for that role. But of all the actors, she was the one that really, really dug in and bonded with all the others during cheer training."

"I was actually the kid who made oaths on the sideline with my best friend that we'd never be cheerleaders," admits Dushku, who followed noteworthy juvenile appearances in such films as "True Lies" and "This Boy's Life" with a high school-finishing education break. "But doing it for this movie, I learned so much. That sounds kind of cliched, but I had never been part of a team before.

"It just gave me a whole new respect for not just cheerleading as a sport, but for the people involved and their devotion. I mean, it takes so much; you need to know dance and gymnastics, and it's pretty admirable."

Dushku (her Albanian-derived name rhymes with "push") spent four weeks at cheer boot camp to train for the production. Real competition cheerleaders, who also appear as members of assorted teams in the movie, helped get the actors up to acrobatic, enthusiasm-oozing speed. Dushku is duly proud that her resulting performance in the film only required one stunt-doubled shot: Missy's audition for the squad that included multiple gymnastics flips.

Still, all the trust games in the world can't build confidence where only experience will do the trick.

"I never got hurt; the guys caught us every time," she says. "But I grew up with three older brothers who I never knew would catch me when they threw me up in the air or not, so for the first week or two I was always holding onto the guys' scalps. They were like, 'Ouch! You've gotta let go!' "

While acknowledging some similarities between the movie and her action-packed TV gig, Dushku is quick to note that most of the fighting on "Buffy" and "Angel" involves highly trained stuntpeople -- hence the reluctance to take on viewers who want to show her how tough they are. Call it a modern actress's dilemma; in previous generations, it was only macho stars like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood who had to answer challenges to their make-believe images.

Not that Dushku longs for the days of female delicacy or anything.

"I always wanted to do anything my brothers could do, better or as well," she reveals. "Times are changing, obviously. When I was younger, little girls couldn't play tag football with the boys, they were supposed to play with dolls. But it's an equality thing now, acknowledging that women are strong and can be fierce and don't have to live under the stereotype that they can't break a nail."

But the new culture is, of course, is just as quick to churn out other stereotypes. Dushku understands that typecasting has to be undercut before it has a chance to take hold.

"I really enjoy playing Faith, because the bad girl can be a very interesting character who's too often played very black-and-white," she observes. "I enjoy playing bad girls in a way that surprises people and I play them well, but it's in no way the only role I would want to play, or that I have played.

"I mean, I don't play the bad girl in 'Bring It On.' But I'm not a blonde-haired blue-eyed girl, so I'm still kind of thought of in that way. Right now, I don't mind it because contrast and conflict is interesting to me. But in the future, I'll probably want to be a good girl at some point."

Checking the career near-term, it looks like a one-out-of-three score. Dushku plays the party animal from the wrong side of the tracks in the upcoming supernatural thriller "Soul Survivor" and a New York gang girl in the Francis Coppola-produced "Taking on the Neighborhood." She describes her role in the high school comedy "The New Guy," however, as "the norm, sweet character in this movie full of comic madness."

But while she's savvy enough to pay some attention to career management, Dushku generally approaches acting with a refreshing lack of neurosis.

"I don't mean to sound cocky or anything, but the truth is that acting was never my passion and it isn't even now," she says. "I do love it, but I just choose roles on the basis of doing things I've never done before and, hopefully, will learn from."

Dushku's attitude is apparently inherited. It was one of her brothers, Nate, who first caught the bug; she got her initial commercial job from tagging along with him to an audition. But neither kid was the product of stage-mothering. Quite the opposite.

"When I was 10, my mother wouldn't even come home to drive me to my first open call," she recalls with a laugh. "When they called for my first L.A. screen test, she said 'No, I don't want that kind of life for my daughter.' My stepfather was like, 'Judy, it's a free trip for you and Eliza. You guys can go to the beach!' Then she was like, 'Oh, yeah.' "

It was partially mom's idea to take the two-year school-finishing break back home (grades had been sliding), but also a desire on Eliza's part to live the last stretch of her childhood as normally as possible.

But her celebrity preceded her. As we said, popularity can stab both ways.

"I was immediately labeled 'The Movie Star' and not invited into a lot of the cliques that had been created in the first half of high school," she recalls. "No one in school likes actresses, and they give you a hard time. Part of it's cool, though, because you get so glorified when you're working. Everyone on the set is always flattering you, so going back to high school and having to fend for yourself kind of balances everything out.

"But it was hard," she admits. "I came home many days, like, sobbing crying. They made fun of everything: my clothes, my body, my perceived attitude. But you get through it; I'm alive to tell about it."

Alive and kicking.

Reprinted from DailyNews - August 25th, 2000