Sarah Michelle Gellar on Why the Buffy Reboot Is Especially ‘Timely’
The 90s icon chats with Glamour about the long-awaited Buffy reboot, how Michael C. Hall helped her prepare to step back into the role, and her one iconic film her kids don’t find cringe.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Sarah Michelle Gellar has had on pop culture. If there was any doubt, just look at the response to the news last month that she has signed on to reboot her beloved character, Buffy Summers, in a new series for Hulu.
In short: Fans freaked out, immediately cheering that their favorite vampire slayer will soon be back on their screens. But for Gellar, jumping back into Buffy‘s world (she played the character on the WB series from 1997 to 2003) and joining the project, which will be helmed by Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao and written by Poker Face creators Nora and Lilla Zukerman, came at exactly the right time.
“What I loved about Buffy was that she was inclusive,” she tells Glamour. “Sometimes I think we go so far and become anti-man, and it’s not about that. It’s about just finding our inner strength and being accepting of the people around us. That was the ultimate message of who she was. She was different, and she accepted herself, and her friends accepted her, and they made their own family. And that’s what life is really about. And so that message, I think, more than ever is timely.”
The Buffy reboot is just one of the many things Gellar is currently juggling. Not only has she recently appeared in the shows Wolf Pack and Dexter: Original Sin, she’s been busy raising her two children with husband and fellow icon Freddie Prinze Jr. Another hobby? Travel. When we speak, she’s still riding high from her recent trip to Paris, and tells me she loves to take her children all over the world with her.
“I’ve just always been enamored with seeing new places and soaking in culture and just seeing the rest of the world,” Gellar, who is partnering with the booking app Trainline to create itineraries for European train-based travel this summer, says.
Gellar chatted with Glamour about the advice her Dexter costar Michael C. Hall told her about returning to an iconic role, her one film her kids don’t find cringe, and her rules for re-creating 90s fashion.
Glamour: You’ve been doing a lot of exciting projects, from Dexter, Original Sin and now the news of the Buffy reboot. How are you fitting it all in?
Sarah Michelle Gellar: It’s always challenging. Being a parent is a full-time job. Your mind is always on them, thinking about them, worrying about them, but it’s also good for children to see parents doing something that they love and having a career and doing something that’s for them. So it’s a balance and there are good days and bad days, and you do the best you can. That’s really all you can do in life.
You’re partnering with Trainline to help families build itineraries for summer travel, but a lot of parents of young kids are nervous about taking the plunge on an international trip. Any advice?
If you’re scared, they’re going to be scared. If you’re anxious, they’re going to be anxious. If you normalize it and do it, it will be normal for them. In terms of train travel, there are not as many rules. The kids, they can walk around, there’s different cars to go to, and it also just affords you different budgets as well.
It also takes some of the stress out. You can plan your vacation to the last second, and then the plane has a malfunction or the pilot doesn’t show up and all of a sudden you’re in a foreign country with a different language. With train travel, it is so easy and Trainline makes it even easier because you just have access to all of these trains.
So many of the projects you starred in – from Cruel Intentions to I Know What You Did Last Summer – have become modern classics and are now having a second life with the younger generation. There’s the Cruel Intentions reboot and now the I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel coming out this year, starring your husband. What has it been like to see your work be so beloved?
As an actor, your goal and hope is that you have at least one project in your life that is impactful to people and that stands the test of time and that new generations discover it. And I’ve been so fortunate to have had many of them. I feel very lucky and it’s exciting. And it’s exciting that emotionally, a lot of these projects still mean a lot to people.
I heard this great quote the other day from Tubi, because Tubi is where a lot of people are discovering Buffy now. They called it new-stalgia.
Oh, interesting, what does that mean?
The idea is that it’s nostalgia for us, but my kids and their friends, it’s new-stalgia for them. They’re discovering it.
Do your kids watch your old projects?
No, I mean, my kids find it pretty cringe. I think they think they have better things to do than watch me on something, but they’ll watch my friends on stuff. Although my kids love I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Are they excited to see Freddie in the new movie?
Yeah. We went as a family to Australia to watch them film, and we had a great time. It helps when your best friend [Jennifer Kaytin Robinson] is also the director.
I loved your response when someone asked you a few months ago if your were going to be in the movie too: “No, I’m dead.”
I’m dead. But I was there in spirit.
You were haunting the set, literally and figuratively.
In more ways than one.
Let’s talk Buffy. What was it like to see the huge fan response to the reboot news?
Definitely, overwhelmed, but also that’s why I am doing it. When you realize what it means and how excited, you’re on the right track with something.
That’s so true. Buffy had some iconic looks; any advice for girls wanting to re-create them?
I mean, hopefully, they’re not tweezing their eyebrows to nonexistence.
We can hope. You just appeared in Dexter: Original Sin, which is itself a prequel to a hugely popular and beloved show. Did you enjoy joining that franchise?
Oh, for sure. I loved Dexter and I was always bummed that I never got to be in the original. And so when the call came and they were like ‘They want to write tis fun role, it will be a lot of pressure.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to be part of the Dexter fandom.’
It was fun too, because I got to pick Michael C. Hall’s brain a little bit about going back to a character. Although poor Michael, I didn’t tell him why I was asking at the time, but I think he kind of figured it out.
He’s like, “This is a suspicious questions, but I won’t ask anything else.”
Yeah, because he’s not a guy that’s going to pry. But he did kind of look at me funny.
He was like, “Does this character’s name start with a B…?”
“Does it rhyme with Fluffy?”
Any more you can share on the project?
Buffy was such a strong female empowerment character, and all of that was done in such an earnest way. So to be doing it with his incredible team of women, to have Chloe Zhao, who’s really never done television, to have one of only three women to ever win the Academy Award as best director at the helm, to have the Zuckermans — I loved Poker Face. I thought it was so smartly written and creative and new – so to have their voice and to have Gail Berman, who is my original mentor for my entire career.
It’s just every time I’m in a room with these women, I’m so charged and fire up and ready to go. And it’s an experience unlike anything I’ve ever had.
Original article at Glamour.
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