Dollhouse has some serious male eye candy with Eliza Dushku and all the dolls running around scantily clad and all innocent with their memories wiped. It's got to have some authoritative gravitas too. Harry Lennix provides a little of that as Boyd, Echo (Dushku)'s personal handler.
Crave Online: Does Boyd understand the technology that's operating in the Dollhouse?
Harry Lennix: That's an excellent question. No. No.
Crave Online: He just runs the place.
Harry Lennix: No, he doesn't. Boyd, the character I play, does not run the Dollhouse. That character is played by Adele Dewitt, or the actress is Olivia Williams, who's beautiful and extremely talented. She runs the Dollhouse. I'm an employee but I simply provide security for one active.
Harry Lennix: No, I'm not a liaison. I look after the best interest of my chief ward, who is Eliza Dushku's character. That's all I do. I don't make policy. I don't do anything like that. I just look after the best interests of my girl.
Crave Online: How does that relationship with Echo develop when she goes back to a blank slate each week?
Harry Lennix: Yes, she is programmed, we find out later, she is programmed to instinctively trust her handler. That's how. That’s why wherever she is at any given time, when she sees her handler, she trusts him automatically.
Crave Online: Are you a big sci-fi fan?
Harry Lennix: You know really, not really, no. The first sci-fi production I ever was involved in was The Matrix. So that was my first and only experience before this and I don't consider this as much sci-fi as the near future, as futurism really, the realm of possibilities. It is a facet of sci-fi.
Crave Online: Is there any connection between coming into Joss's world to the Matrix world?
Harry Lennix: I'm not aware of that in pre-exposure to sci-fi fans. I really don't know. To me, fans who like a certain show are pretty much a fan. They're just people who like the make believe and who express their interest and enthusiasm for a particular piece. I don't notice as a function of having been involved with this show or The Matrix.
Crave Online: Do you get to go on some of the missions with Echo?
Harry Lennix: Well, I go on every mission with Echo, yes. That's my job. There are some times when she has to, for reasons that are fairly obvious, she has to be alone, but I am close by every site when she's on a mission.
Crave Online: Any action and stunts for you?
Harry Lennix: Yeah. For me, it's great. I don't get a chance to do a lot of action hero stuff so when I said I love the character, one of the reasons I love it is because I get to do what I don't normally do.
Crave Online: Boyd seems to be sort of a father figure too, looking out for Echo, questioning the whole operation. How much does that continue week to week?
Harry Lennix: One well placed question resonates I think and that's really what I was talking about, how acting really is about trying to take an extremely transitory and brief moment and making it into an eternity. Really the eternal moments and the eternal questions that we haven't been able to get past. What is life? What is human consciousness? What is free will? What is legal? Why are things illegal or illegal? These are good questions.
Crave Online: How was your character affected by the redo of the pilot?
Harry Lennix: Not terribly affected at all. In fact, my main through line is the same and I think will stay the same. My job is to protect Echo so all the permutations of the pilot before to the one now really have not been affected one way or the other.
Crave Online: Is there anything you would want to hire an operative for?
Harry Lennix: That's an excellent question. I have a very quick answer of no. I wouldn't. There's nothing that happens in the Dollhouse that [appeals to] Boyd Langdon. Now, Harry is a different question but I don't think that Boyd approves of what goes on. So I don't think that he will participate in it. This is a pretty straight laced guy, even if he's not always by the numbers.
Crave Online: Are there any assignments that tests Boyd's acceptance of the service?
Harry Lennix: I'm trying to think of one that does not. I think that they all trouble Boyd.
Crave Online: The negotiator in the pilot wasn't that controversial.
Harry Lennix: No, although I had to take a man's life in the course of it, so I think whenever that happens, that's a problem. It's the underlying problem that he has with what the Dollhouse is doing that I find most resonant. If you have to do something, let's say as a cop, an ex-cop, Boyd Langdon is of the belief that if you have to do something that is that illegal, that secretive, that costs that much money, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it. If you can't do something with somebody by their own free will, then you shouldn't be doing it. If I have to go out and hire a girl for a weekend, and that girl really at the heart of it doesn't know what she's doing with me, then in some place, in some way she's compromised and used.
Crave Online: How did this show come to you?
Harry Lennix: I was doing all 10 August Wilson plays at the Kennedy Center and the moment that I finished that job, I came back to L.A. and Dollhouse was all the talk of the town for television. I went in and auditioned. I think Joss was there, he had a cold. I came back for a callback and Eliza was there and Fran Kranz was there. Then the next thing I knew, it was between me and two or three other guys. And the next thing I knew they cast me.
Crave Online: Do you like working in the morally gray area?
Harry Lennix: Absolutely. I think that there is no drama without morally gray. There isn't. No character, no play is worth doing where the person is okay with everything they do all the time. There always has to be a crisis that comes up, usually not vis a vis another character, but vis a vis the person's own conscience. Yes, I love it. What takes priority in a given circumstance, your feelings, your professional obligation, another person's well being? For me, these are the very substance of drama.
Crave Online: What is it like in the set of that Dollhouse?
Harry Lennix: When I go into it every time I'm actually filled with awe. It has a kind of reverential quality. It's like walking into a cathedral. At the same time, the goings on in the Dollhouse are almost antithetical to what would happen in the church. In fact, it's almost everything you couldn't do in a church, but there's still an ethic that underlies, I think, both Topher and Boyd, everybody who's essentially not an active. There is a kind of quest for what is ultimately human, what actually is it to grapple with these questions? When do you actually have free will? When do you actually get to make the decision of what is right and wrong, and are those ever objective, universal truths? So I think that, while it is not a church, the questions that are dealt with are equally humanistic and almost, to some extent, getting to what it is to be divine, what it is to live in a kind of alternate consciousness to our normal human selves.
Crave Online: Will you be able to return to Little Brittain USA as the Obama-esque president?
Harry Lennix: I did not know it had been picked up. So that's news to me. That's fantastic. They have not yet contacted me as to whether or not that character is going to go forward. I would imagine, as long as President Obama is President, they may find some currency to cash in for humor. I'm excited about both shows. The guys on Little Britain USA are obviously comic geniuses. They know more about American comedy and actually specifically black American comedy than I know. It was remarkable to work with them and then being able to work with Eliza and Joss and the rest of this remarkable cast is also equally fun. So that's where I get a lot of joy just in acting. Now, I will say that Little Britain is an AFTRA contract, Dollhouse aside. So we hope to keep that going as well.
