In Step with
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Like so many young people, Sarah Michelle Gellar talks fast,
freely and enthusiastically about her work and what she thinks of
it. On one kind of question, though, she falls mute. She lives in
the hills above L.A., she told me. When I asked if she lived
alone, Sarah replied: "That's a question I don't want to answer."
But does she live with her family? "I won't talk about
that," she said. "Privacy is something I value." Other than that,
she told me the family name is pronounced Gell-are. But since
everyone says Gell-er, even she finds herself saying that too.
When she became a professional, there was already an actress
named Sarah Gellar, so she inserted the Michelle into her acting
name. She hasn't been to college -- there hasn't been time. But
she said if her career ever went south, she'd take the
opportunity to get a higher education. With her busy schedule,
how does she stay fit?
"I'm an hour's drive away from my trainer," she said, "and I keep
a treadmill in my condo, and I have a mini-trampoline."
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
Buffy The Vampire Slayer wasn't slaying vampires when I called.
She was on location in North Carolina, shooting a feature film
called I Know What You Did Last Summer, due out in
October. Buffy is really Sarah Michelle Gellar, a wonderful young
actress from New York who's work turned Buffy the Vampire
Slayer on The WB Network into one of the surprise hits on the
TV season that just ended. When we spoke, Sarah was getting ready
to start shooting a second season of Buffy. This was after only
12 hours of the series in its first season, beginning in
March.
"We made a two-hour pilot and then 10 one-hour episodes," she
told me. "We shoot for four days in the studio in Santa Monica
and another four days on location." As for the season's last
episode, Sarah said: "We had a grand finale, and I'm so proud of
it. It's in itself a full feature film." The TV series is
actually a spin-off of a 1992 movie by the same name (which
starred Luke Perry and Kristy Swanson), but the same creator,
Joss Whedon, who's still only 30. Sarah's Buffy is a grittier
character than the film version: by day, a pretty typical
highschooler; by night, a martial-arts expert, confronting the
forces of evil. Since in real life Sarah practices tae kwon do,
the Korean art of self-defense, I asked if they tailored the role
for her and if they listen to her suggestions on character or
story line. "Sure, they listen," she said, "but basically, Joss
is so brilliantly creative that your ideas are never going to be
as good as his ideas."
Sarah was equally enthusiastic about the film on which she was
working. "It is so scary, so unbelievably scary," she said. "It's
based on a popular kids' book about four teens. It's the Fourth
of July weekend, and I'm the local beauty queen, and the four of
us go partying -- Doing teen stuff, having a drink, fooling
around. Nothing serious. Except that on the way home, we hit and
kill this guy. And to cover it up, we throw the body into the
water. And then, one year later, we meet this guy
who says, 'I know what you did last summer...'"
In 1995 Sarah won an Emmy for her work on All My Children,
playing the conniving daughter of Erica Kane (Susan Lucci). She
also worked with Robert Urich on his Spencer: For Hire
series. "I was 8 or 9, and he was just wonderful to me," she
recalled. Around the same time, she was in a New York stage
production of The Widow Claire, first playing opposite Matthew
Broderick. "Then his film, Ferris Bueler came out," she said,
"and Matthew was replaced in the play by Eric Stoltz. And then
Stoltz's film, Some Kind of Wonderful came out. I was the most
popular girl in school, because I was working with both of
them!"