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No crosses or stakes were present—not even the Slayer Scythe. Instead, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s dressing room featured items of mundane, not-vampire-slayer sensibilities: a craft services table with white roses, raw honey, and a Diptyque Baies candle.
Standing in the wing, waiting for our conversation, I observed her lightning-fast speaking cadence—bubbly and dripping with sweetness, like the notes of blackcurrant that filled the Brooklyn film studio. The leather and crop top-laden Y2K style she shaped—ironically, stakes never caught on—was swapped for a practical, ribbed-knit black cardigan, charcoal trousers, and a pair of white slippers most often seen in five-star hotels or Emirates flights. She is aspirationally cool, dressed comfortably for a day of press, celebrating her global ambassadorship with Olay, where she is the face of their newly reformulated Regenerist Micro-Sculpting Cream. It’s also worth noting that, at five feet four inches, she is diminutive enough (at least to this 5’11” reporter) to evoke the same level of cute aggression as a teacup Chihuahua or a Precious Moments figurine.
Our conversation began with an admission that would strike a pang of dread into the hearts of fact-checkers. According to an online encyclopedia of dubious reporting, we are living in Gellar’s "resurgence (2021–present),” following “hiatus and sporadic roles (2011–2020),” as listed under her biblical-length career summary. She is a cookbook author, a mom, a star of film and television, and an MTV Movie Award winner for Best Kiss, alongside her Cruel Intentions co-star, Selma Blair.
“I call it my second act,” she says of her current state. “I think that I've been working for such a long time, and I had these two young kids, and then after we lost Robin Williams, I just needed a break.” (Gellar starred alongside Williams on the CBS sitcom, The Crazy Ones, which became Williams’ last television role before his passing in 2014.) She returned in 2022, appearing in the Netflix comedy-thriller Do Revenge, after buckling to the age-old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or, when the cult of SMG screams “more,” you must meet their demand. “I realized how much I missed [acting],” she says.
Of her return, though, she says her approach to work has shifted. After all, she’s a mother of two and started working as an actor before many of her peers could read books without pictures. “My priorities for now are doing things that are fun, that feed my soul,” she says, thoughtfully selecting each word, as if scrutinizing what does feed her soul. “I don't feel this need to prove I've accomplished more in my life than I probably ever thought I would accomplish.”
“I don't feel this need to prove I've accomplished more in my life than I probably ever thought I would accomplish.”
The list of those accomplishments is expansive and, at times, absurd. For example, when Gellar was five, she was caught in the crosshairs of a lawsuit between Burger King and McDonald’s after starring in a commercial for the former. Accordingly, she was banned from McDonald’s as a child. While I didn’t have the time to dive headfirst into that ball pit of drama, I had plenty of time to inspect her most noteworthy role—the crown jewel of the Sarah Michelle Gellar archive: Scooby Doo. Kidding. I am, of course, referencing Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
More than 22 years after the Everygirl-with-a-stake Buffy destroyed the Hellmouth, r/buffy on Reddit is still ablaze (with 6,700 active members at the time of reporting) and “Buffy Studies” college courses that examine media, feminism, and culture. Of this impact, I shared that I, too, took a Buffy class over the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, and that my best friend’s ringtone has been the Buffy theme song since I’ve known her. “It's only with time that you can really appreciate the effect that [Buffy] had,” she says, noting a degree of doubt during the early Buffy years—uncertainty that it could withstand the test of time. “But the fact that young kids today are finding that show and finding that it's speaking to them, that's when you know it really did something important and you were part of something important.”
Gellar in all her stake-welding glory as Buffy.
Of course, it must be strange to reach such renown at a young age. After all, there are very few people whose appearance as a 20-something is immortalized in the public consciousness; the curiosity of seeing yourself—laugh lines and crow’s feet-free—on a small screen across the aisle on a flight, or, more realistically, in a TikTok video. In the archaeology of my reporting, I unearthed several written artifacts from the early aughts that praised Gellar’s work in expanding what women can be in film and television—all the while commenting on her thinness, beauty, and, ahem, did I mention thinness? We live in a different era where such reporting would be condemned. And in this more enlightened time, Gellar is nonplussed at the thought of aging. “Look, it’s hard, [but] I don't want to be 20 again,” the 48-year-old says. “I wouldn't mind having that plump, juicy skin of a 20-year-old, but I don't want to be that anymore. And I do believe that a lot of it does come from the inside.” When it comes to her partnership with Olay, the idea makes a lot of sense: An upgrade for a time-honored product reflected in the face of a woman who never stops evolving.
Perhaps chalked up to her Hollywood darling status, or perhaps because she has a young daughter, Gellar is particularly aware of celebrity and social media’s influence on culture’s relationship to aging, exacerbated by the in-feed prevalence of aesthetic treatments used to rewind (inject, lift, or suture) the clock. “Every day on my Instagram feed, [I see] 25-year-olds getting deep-plane facelifts and I'm thinking, what's happening?” she says. “It would be setting such a weird beauty standard if, all of a sudden, I had a completely different face.” And, as so many things with Gellar go, Buffy Summers re-enters the conversation, as Gellar’s North Star: “Buffy was a hero because she wasn't like everybody else, but she was herself, and she was okay with that,” she said. “And I'm me, and I've learned that I like me. I'm okay with what I look like and who I am.”
That is not to say she didn’t have her share of transformations in between roles and across the span of her career. In Scooby Doo, she wore an auburn wig as Daphne Blake. For all-around bad girl Kathryn Merteuil in Cruel Intentions, Gellar’s (real) hair was dyed espresso brown—as dark as Kathryn’s duplicity. Discussing her former roles, I shared my belief that the fate of Helen Shiver, the crestfallen failed actress and Croaker Queen of I Know What You Did Last Summer, was the most chilling fright in the Sarah Michelle Gellar Universe. For the uninformed, Helen wakes up in a pile of her own hair, courtesy of an unwelcome trim from the film’s slasher. This is not how Helen dies, of course; that happens later. I told Gellar I would much prefer to be taken out then and there in lieu of waking up with an unwelcome bob.
Gellar says she experienced her own hair transformation around the same time she filmed I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Laughing, Gellar shares that Helen’s trials and tribulations weren’t too different from her own at the time. After years of exploring every hue on the spectrum between blonde and brunette, her hair was broken and falling out. (In life, sometimes we are our worst enemies—our own Slasher.) “Nowadays, if someone did that, you would just have extensions, but in those days, no one knew about extensions,” she says. “I, Sarah, didn’t even learn about extensions until a few years later, when Gwyneth Paltrow wore them to the SAG Awards or something for Shakespeare in Love.”
So, here we are in the Gellar resurgence. Armed with a keen understanding of hair extension technology and the type of work that brings her joy, I ask what’s next for Gellar, for the woman who has seemingly done it all. “We're in this time where it's [about] content, and your content can be anywhere. It's about what interests you,” she says. “And the only thing that's important to me… [is] my no assholes policy: I want to work with people I want to work with and do the things that seem fun.”
While we were on set, I didn’t notice any vampires. I did not notice any assholes on set, either. They likely stay hidden in the shadows, too, when Gellar is around, as vampires avoid Buffy. In many ways, Gellar still is Buffy and Buffy is still Gellar—and both can kick your ass.
