Eliza Dushku

I was raised in Boston by three older brothers and a very strong and empowering single mom.

My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron.

I remember hitting Sarah Michelle Gellar with a right hook during my first week on the job. It was awful. They usually pair actors with stunt doubles to avoid things like that.

Each year, I say I’m going to go to school next year. It’s inevitable that I’ll end up getting my education.

The letters from jail are always disconcerting.

My mother would take groups of students to different countries and always brought us along, so by the time I was 10, I had been to Russia, China, Nicaragua and several other countries.

I’m self-confident and not afraid to speak my mind.

If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be in school studying political science or socioeconomic something. I love visiting different cultures and finding out how they make up a society.

It’s easy to play a bad girl: You just do everything you’ve been told not to do, and you don’t have to deal with the consequences, because it’s only acting.

We didn’t have a TV in the living room and all my friends thought we were kind of weird. When they’d come over, my mom wanted to talk to them about current events.

I’m a more mature actress now.

For the longest time, I thought I was a boy. I really did. I wore boys’ clothes, played tag football.

In my first movie, That Night, with Juliette Lewis, I had a scene with two other girls where we applied a cream to our chests to make our breasts grow. I was 10.

Go big or go home. Because it’s true. What do you have to lose?

My mom is this liberal, feminist, Mormon powerhouse. I just love her to death.

When I worked with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, she told me, You need a plan B, because when you have six months to a year off, you can go nuts. You need to have another focus.

I don’t care who you are, everyone has been through it – that feeling where you’d like to be someone else.

When you get to your mid-20s, you start to feel responsibilities for the things that you do and the people around you. It’s a cool age.

I don’t let guys do hickeys. That’s like a dog marking his territory or something.

TV can be a long commitment.

There is definitely something sexy about a girl with an attitude and a pair of leather pants.