If you still picture Eliza Dushku as Faith, the tough-as-nails outsider who could throw a punch and a one-liner, you’re not wrong. You’re just a few life chapters behind. But Dushku didn’t fade out. She walked off set. Forever.
In 2017, she retired from acting and closed a 25-year run that started because a 9-year-old kid tagged along to her brother’s audition in Boston, tripped, and basically got hired on the spot. Casting directors stopped a three-month search and put her in 1992’s That Night with Juliette Lewis. One minute you’re falling on your face, the next you’re sharing scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in This Boy’s Life, then Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies. Hollywood loves a shortcut.
At 17, she nearly ditched it all for Suffolk University, dorm room picked and ready, until Buffy called. Three episodes became 20. Then came Angel and Bring It On (released August 22, 2000), where Missy showed up with “100 percent attitude” and that felt-tip barbed wire energy.
Dushku doesn’t pretend it was all great. “I had many beautiful experiences. Certainly, I also had many harder experiences…” Those “harder experiences” collided with #MeToo when she shared she was sexually assaulted on a set at age 12. She also sued CBS over harassment on Bull and won a substantial settlement.
Then she did something you can actually learn from: she chose healing on purpose. In 2018, she described a guided MDMA and psilocybin session as “a mental health deep dive.” After that, she said, “I very quickly connected to the awareness that I was not living my highest purpose…”
Back in Boston, she earned a master’s in clinical mental health counseling, focused on addiction, recovery, and trauma. She even skipped the Bring It On 25-year reunion because she had a new counseling job and “glorious documentation + session prep.”
Now she’s executive producing Netflix’s In Waves and War with husband Peter Palandjian, following Navy SEALs who travel to Mexico for psychedelic therapy. She keeps it grounded: “Psychedelic therapy is not a panacea. It’s not a magic bullet that will work for everybody, but it should absolutely be available and be an option.”
And if you’re hoping for Faith’s big comeback, she’s clear. “Oh yeah. I will not be in front of a camera again unless it’s in some capacity that is in service of my new work and passion.”
Eliza Dushku is still the same beautiful actress from Buffy, but older, wiser and, now, with a new mission in life.
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