She won the hearts if not the souls of fans as Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Now Eliza Dushku is returning to the big screen in Steve Carpenter’s new chiller Soul Survivors (just delayed till September), in which three young survivors of a traffic accident must battle their own demons. Dushku play Annabel, best friend of 19-year-old Cassie (newcomer Melissa Sagemiller), who has begun seeing dead people. Annabel tries to help Cassie, even as her own behavior becomes increasingly bizarre and sexual after the crash.

On a Chicago soundstage, Dushku has just finished a scene with Wes Bentley, who plays her boyfriend ( and Cassie’s ex-beau) in the film. Carpenter releases her early for the day, and she heads off to her trailer to talk about her role on the film.

"This movie is about four kids who age going off to college," says Dushku. "Cassie and I are best friends. Her boyfriend is Sean, played by Casey [Affleck], and my boyfriend is Wes, who plays Matt. Annabel has the wild, party instincts - it’s apparent from the first scene when they pick me up that I’ve had a rougher upbringing, and I’m a little more frayed around the edges. So when we go off to college, my first instinct is, ‘Let’s get into a party crowd - we’re on our own, we’re free, let’s be crazy.’

"I drag the four of us to this club that I’ve heard about, and on the way home we get into a car crash. From there on, everyone starts getting a little odd, and things start to become a little mysterious. My character, after the accident, gets very dark. She loses her sense of civility and she gets sucked into this dark crowd and starts handing out with different people. She becomes friends with this character named Raven, and starts to have some strange sexual experiences with her."

The actress says she has enjoyed playing a girl who undergoes such a significant personality change. "Annabel’s kind of ‘Screw you, I’m going to do it my way; It’s my way or the highway,’ which I see a lot of in Faith," says Dushku. "Annabel’s not mean-hearted; she just never had disciplinary figures. In a sense, she’s a lot like Faith, but she’s not malicious - it’s just the car accident messes her up a little bit. Throughout the movie, Annabel does things that you might not understand, but it all comes together, and you get wise to why she gets lost."

Annabel is not a bad person, Dushku explains, which is the principal difference between her and the actress’ Buffy character. "Faith is evil, and that’s the bottom line," says Dushku. "She started out nice and she turned evil, and she’s just very stubborn. Television and film are different in that way. You don’t go as deep in TV - not in a bad way, but sometimes film is a little more three- dimensional. This is my own theory, but TV is a little more two-and- a-half-dimensional. It’s quicker and faster-paced, and you’re packing more into a certain time - if you’re bad, you’re bad, if you’re good, you’re good, if you’re in-between, you’re in-between. With Faith, I’m just bad, but you never know. I can do an episode where I redeem myself part-way, but then you can have and episode where I’m just evil!"

"In this movie, you see that Annabel has some lousy motives at times, but when it comes down to it, she’s just lost and she loves her friend Cassie," Dushku continues. "But after the crash, where some people are injured and some people die, instead of dealing with it, Annabel decides to just lose herself and take the easy route - whether it’s drugs or partying all night or getting involved with the wrong crowd. She gets sucked in and tries to pull Cassie down with her. Cassie and Annabel start as best friends, but I’m pulling her in ways she doesn’t want to go, and the plot thickens. Annabel is very manipulative, because she doesn’t like to listen and she’s very impulsive."

A native of Boston who began her career in children’s theater there, Dushku started her film career with That Night when she was 10 years old. Her rapid career rise included co-starring gigs opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in James Cameron’s True Lies and holding her own in This Boy’s Life with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. It was her role as Faith, the vampire slayer who thrives on violence, that captured the attention of Buffy fans, but after establishing herself on the series, she began to think about moving on.

"Just after I finished Buffy, there was a time of ‘What do I want to do? Do I want to come back next season or do some films?’ says Dushku. "I got on the ball and started reading a ton of scripts, and I found two that I really liked, this one Bring it on, which I did just before this."

Afraid she would have to choose between the two films, Dushku was relieved when the shooting schedule of Soul Survivors allowed her to do both. "I literally got two offers the same day." She explains. "I really wanted to do a comedy, but I wanted to do this movie also, and it worked out that this movie got pushed and I got to do both. I literally had one day in between! I finished shooting Bring It On in San Diego, and I was home in LA for a day. I had to unpack everything from San Diego, then repack it all for Chicago and head there. It’s been tough. I don’t know if I’ll ever do two movies back to back again, because I’m a little crazy now!"

The actress admits to having some concerns that Soul Survivors’ Annabel and Faith were too similar. "I loved the script, but I knew I didn’t want to get typecast. I tend to play the bad girl!" she laughs. "I’m always like a vampire of the night, which I love!"

Although Dushku has worked with special makeup characters on Buffy, Soul Survivors is the first is the first time she has had to undergo such extensive work herself. "We have a lot of prosthetics in this movie," she says. "On Buffy, they do a lot of that on the vampires, but I’ve never had it done, and it’s really interesting to see your face all sliced up! You get in your trailer and you forget, and you look in the mirror and you’re like, ‘Ahh!’"

Working with Carpenter on his first directing effor since his ‘80s work on the likes of The Kindrid has proven to be a positive experience, she offers, explaining that the writer/director has helped all of the cast build their characters."Steve’s really cool," Dushku says. "We’ve all come into this movie and worked together, and from day one. We got together for private dinner with him and discussed our roles. From that point on, that was the ground base, and every day when we were doing scenes, it just built up. We try different things, and that’s the best way to work."

Because Carpenter conceived of and wrote the project, Dushku says she has been satisfied to follow his lead, rather than offer too many thoughts and opinions. "I’m not the kind of actor who’s really into suggestions, especially since he has written it," she notes. "I like to come in an say, ‘You’re the director, you’re basically the god of this picture, you’re the one who saw it before it’s made, you’re the one who has a vision of how you want it to bed. I’m just the actor. We’ll show each other the respect for each other’s ideas, but when it comes down to it, I’m here to put on film what you envisioned.’"

The Soul Survivors cast has become very tight as a result of working together closely. "The first time I met Melissa, we really hit it off," says Dushku. "Everyone on this film, as always, is older than me - I’m the young ‘un on the set. Still, though it sounds dumb to say, I did grow up fast, and I believe that I am more mature than most 18-year-olds in whatever sense, and so I’ve been able to have a very equal relationship with people. They treat me with just as much respect as if I was their age. Melissa has a couple of years on me, but we hi it off, and she’s learned things from me and I’ve learned things from her. We get along great, even off the set. She’s one of my closest friends here in Chicago. She’s a doll."

Bentley, whose powerful performance in American Beauty won critical acclaim, helped to ground Dushku in their scenes together. "He’s awesome!" Dushku says. "He’s really talented. What I learned from him was, in my acting, I like to be on the move - that’s just me personally and with characters, I usually bring a lot of myself to them. So where I’m impatient through the whole movie - ‘Let’s do this and this and this and this’ - it’s really cool to watch him, because he’s very serious and intense without moving. It works for our characters. I’m trying to make Cassie do what I want to do, and he’s trying to get her to do what he wants her to do. It’s good chemistry that we have, both when we’re together and when we’re off doing opposite things. It’s a good contrast. And he’s really cool as a guy. I love him!"

The three of them, along with Affleck comprise the Soul Survivors’ "Gang of four," both on and off the set, according to Dushku. "The four of us just get along so well - it’s funny, because on our call sheets, we’re called ‘The Gang,’" she says. "Whenever it was talking about the four of us, it was ‘The Gang goes to the club’ or ‘The Gang gets in a car accident.’ We made a totally big joke out of it! We’d hang out, and it was like, ‘Aww, the gang is out for a bite to eat,’ or ‘The Gang’s out for a movie!’ It’s cool. I’d worked with Casey about five years ago [in the teen pic Race The Sun], so it was really good to see him again. We work well together I didn’t get as many scenes with Casey, but I love him - we’re both from Boston."

Some of Soul Survivors was filmed on location in Chicago’s Uptown area, a once-thriving neighborhood that has fallen on hard times in recent years. The film unit turned a deteriorating local theater into a hip club. For what turned out to be the actress’ favorite moments. "I loved the club scenes," says Dushku. "People are just going to freak out over how cool they look. We shot in the Uptown Theater, which was built in the early 1900s. It cost them almost $10 million back then. They’ve never restored it, but it’s amazing. It’s so beautiful, yet there are chunks of it falling off. Things are rusted out. It’s got this eerie feeling about it.

"We shot in all different areas - in the basement, even in the bathroom downstairs. They were kind of intact, and it was this weird, surreal spooky world. They brought in big barrels with bonfires in them, and a hug music system pumping, with hundreds of extras in wild clothes. We made our own club! We were all saying, ‘This is the coolest club we’ve never been to!’ It was a bad neighborhood, and here we were walking around in skimpy outfits to and from set. We’d get to our trailers and lock our doors!"

Dushku wasn’t a fan of sci-fi or horror when she was younger, and when she was cast in Buffy, she never even seen the series. "I definitely gained a greater respect for the genre after working on Buffy," she says. "I was never a fan of it, and I never watched the show before I was on it. I didn’t even understand it! I didn’t get the whole craze about vampires. I mean, they’re fake! But once I worked on it, I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool, the way they can create something that seems so real when it’s so not!’ I fell into it and started to appreciate it - I really gained new respect for it. I don’t know if I’d make supernatural movies my whole career, but I’m definitely more open to it."

Dushku’s Buffy role originally came about after she had taken a break from acting to complete high school. "I took two years off from acting after I had done all those movies," she says. "I really wanted to go to high school - my parents are both teachers, and they were like, ‘No kid of mine’s not going to at least get into a college and do the whole route’ - my mom’s a professor. So I went back to school, brought my grades up and got into some good colleges. Then I went through my senior year just because I wanted to - I had so much fun my junior year.

"Then I graduated, and I was going to go off to college. I had met Sarah Gellar when I was really young because we have the same manager. I knew of her being on the show, but I didn’t know anything about it, and she filled me in on it. I made a tape and sent it off, and literally, they were like, ‘Will you come on for five shows?’ It was pretty cool of them - I had been out of the spotlight for a while, and they were giving me a chance to restart this career that I’d had fun with. I didn’t know if it was what I wanted to do, but I thought I’d move to California for a while. Around December, they said, ‘Would you come back and be our villain this season and stay longer?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, this is so cool, I love the martial arts aspect of it,’ I was really excited at how the shows came out."

Unlike many actors, Dushku has no prejudice about doing films over television, and enjoys jumping between the two. I don’t believe in that ‘TV is less respectable than movies’ thing at all!" she says. "It’s the opposite; it’s all about your craft and what you want do and what you have fun with. It’s not so political as people make it seem. If you like the project, then do it! Stop worrying about how you’re going to be perceived."

Although her first couple of episodes as Faith were difficult, Dushku says she soon began to feel comfortable, and even began providing input into the character’s development. "It was a little bit like I wasn’t quiet getting it," she says. "I would work with one director for eight days on one episode, and then just as I was starting to get what he wanted, there was a new director. It was bugging me out for the first two weeks. After that, it was cool. It seemed Joss would write the episodes knowing the way I was. I just went over the top with Faith. If she was going to be the crazy Slayer who is basically buffy’s nemesis, then I was going to be everything, she wasn’t! Scream when she wants to be quiet, be quiet when she screams. I kind of worked on Sarah, and it was fun. She was cool and got just as much of a kick out of it as I did at being polar opposites, like black and white. We just went from there."

Faith also turned up sporadically on Buffy’s companion show Angel over the past two seasons, and while Dushku relishes further film roles, she’ll be happy to make more appearances as the now- repentant Slayer if asked. "I was only going to go on Buffy for five shows at the beginning, and then they asked me to stay," says the actress, currently reteaming with De Niro in the crime drama The City By the Sea. "I signed on episode by episode, and it was like, ‘If they’ve got cool stuff for me to do, then I’ll keep on doing it!’ So I ended up staying on until the season finale, and then it ended there was a hiatus, and I wanted to do films again. I won’t be going back on Buffy or Angel forever, but hey, when it’s on and they want to write stuff for me, I have fun and I want to do it!"

Reprinted from Fangoria - April 2001