Eliza Dushku, 100-lb heavyweight, goes up against Robert De Niro [and everyone else]

Eliza Dushku, strikes a fighter's pose for the finale in director Kevin Smith's new slapstick comedy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Her stance is tough, assured. Her tiny hips jut to one side, and her hands are balled into fists. While Smith struggles to get the right camera angle, and CO-star Ben Afflict looks on, Dushku delivers the same line - "I am so sick of this bull-s--t!" - over and over before a stuntwoman mock-kicks her in the head.

"We always fight stunt doubles; otherwise the actors would do too much damage to one another," explains Dushku, twenty, with a wry smile while striding off the L.A. set for a quick break. She plops into a director's chair and takes a deep breath. "They don't actually hit you, but you get thrown around. I had my face smashed earlier; that hurt."

For Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel fans, Dushku in a brawl should be easy to picture; as Buffy's gravely voiced nemesis, Faith, she held her own against Sarah Michelle Gellar, both as adversary and star. She got raves in last summer's hit Bring It On, playing a hard-edged cheerleader opposite perky team captain Kirsten Dunst. Next, Dushku takes no prisoners in three upcoming movies. The New Guy, about a geek who reinvents himself as the big man on campus (from the writer of There's Something About Mary), and Jay and Silent Bob are both out this summer. In September she stars in City by the Sea, appearing opposite Robert De Niro - for the second time.

Dushku first met De Niro when she was ten. She landed the part of his daughter in This Boy's Life after grabbing a casting director's attention when she fell and got a bloody nose at a commercial audition. "She was fairly precocious, confident, and she could act - and was therefore known to Bob [De Niro] and me as "that pain in the a--," says Boy's Life director Michael Caton-ones. "Eliza's very noisy, Bob's very quiet; I was the referee."

Cut to last winter, when Jones reunited Dushku and De Niro for City by the Sea, about a cop who investigates his own son for murder. This time, the "pain in the a--" plays the reformed-junkie mother of De Niro's baby grandson. "The first time Bob saw me again he had this look like, 'Oh my God, the kid got breasts!'" Dushku says with a throaty laugh. "I think I made the guy blush a couple of times." If anyone could make De Niro blush, it would be Dushku, who says she was born with "an attitude." She and he three older brothers were raised in a Mormon household by their mom, a divorced feminist political-science professor at Suffolk University in Boston. But early on Dushku realized she wasn't Mormon material, often ditching church and hitchhiking home.

Dushku's brand of bad girl gone good - or good girl gone bad, depending on the part - is riveting to watch. She exemplifies a unique female prototype: the girl who just doesn't give a [insert your own four-letter word here] what anyone else thinks. At a mere five feet four and 100 pounds, Dushku gives the impression that she could kick your butt.

Unfortunately, there's no time to don boxing gloves; Dushku has to go get her head bashed some more. She grabs a cookie off a plate and crams it in her mouth and then, almost as an afterthought, hands you a double-chocolate one and says, "You know, I really am probably one of the sweetest, most sensitive people you'll ever meet." This may be true, but as you watch her storm back on set you can't help thinking, That stunt double better watch her back.

Reprinted from Elle - By Deanna Kizis - May 2001