Dushku was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, to Judith “Judy”, a university administrator and professor at Suffolk University, and Philip R. Dushku, an administrator and teacher in the Boston Public Schools. Dushku’s father is Albanian-American and her mother has Danish ancestry. Dushku attended Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass and graduated from Watertown High School (Massachusetts) as a teenager. She was raised a Mormon, the faith of her mother (though she is not actively practicing). She has three older brothers, Aaron, Benjamin “Ben”, and Nathan “Nate”, the last of whom is also an actor and a model. Her parents divorced when she was still an infant.
Dushku came to the attention of casting agents when she was 10. She was chosen at the end of a five month search throughout the United States for the lead role of Alice, opposite Juliette Lewis in the film That Night. In 1993, Dushku landed a role as Pearl alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in This Boy’s Life, a role that she said opened a lot of doors. The following year, she played the teenage daughter of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies. She also had parts as Paul Reiser’s daughter in Bye Bye, Love, as Cindy Johnson with Halle Berry and Jim Belushi in Race the Sun, as well as roles in a television movie and a short film.
Dushku then took some time off from acting to finish her junior and senior years of high school.
After completing high school, Dushku returned to acting with the role of Faith, a Slayer much more troubled than the main character Buffy. Though initially planned as a five episode role, the character became so popular that she stayed on for the entirety of the third season and returned for a two-part appearance in season four, after which the remainder of her original story arc was played out as part of the first season of the Buffy spin-off series, Angel. Repentant and rededicated, Faith returned as a heroine in a number of further episodes of Angel and in the last five episodes of Buffy.
In 2000, Dushku starred in Soul Survivors, reuniting her with Race The Sun co-star Casey Affleck. She followed that up with the cheerleader comedy Bring It On with Kirsten Dunst, which was a surprising success at the box office that spawned straight-to-DVD sequels. 2001 saw a busy time for her: shooting The New Guy in Texas and having to shuttle up to New York where she was reunited with actor Robert De Niro and director Michael Caton-Jones in City by the Sea. She played James Franco’s junkie girlfriend and mother of his child. The film garnered attention from a wider adult audience and several good reviews.
The same year Kevin Smith invited Dushku to be a part of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where Dushku co-starred with Shannon Elizabeth, Ali Larter, Ben Affleck, and others.
2003 saw the release of Wrong Turn, a horror film in which Dushku had the starring role, and The Kiss, an independent comedy-drama. Starting that same year, she also starred in a new Fox TV series, Tru Calling, where she played the main character, Tru Davies, a medical student whose grant is pulled out from under her, forcing her to take a job at a local morgue where she discovers that she has the power to “re-live” the previous day over again, an ability she used to right wrongful deaths.
Dushku starred in an off-Broadway production entitled Dog Sees God from December 2005, playing “Van’s sister”, a character paralleled with Lucy from original Peanuts comic strip that the play production is based on.
She played Eve, the lead character on “Nurses” (also known as Philadelphia General), a hospital comedy/drama for Fox. This was the second FOX pilot in which she has been cast, but will not be broadcast.[5] Dushku voiced the role of Yumi Sawamura in the English language version of the PlayStation 2 video game Yakuza, published and developed by SEGA, and released in September 2006. She appeared in the Simple Plan music video, “I’m Just a Kid”, as the band’s love interest, as well as Nickelback’s video for “Rockstar”.
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