.......I wish people wouldn't leave open graves around like this. Quite a creepy thought, but that's just busness-as-usual for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar, high school student by day and vampire fighter by night. Having the summer off from slaying the undead, Gellar took the opportunity to make two movies. What kind you might ask? Horror films of course. This Holloween the 20 year old actress stars in Columbia Pictures' I Know What You Did Last Summer, a story about four high school graduates who kill a man and make a desperate pact to conceal their secret. A year later, an unknown avenger begins to stalk them in a deadly game.
.......Always surrounded by people trying to kill her at work, Gellar has been preparing for these roles all her life by watching scary movies. "I think most people are fans of horror movies. It is an adrenaline high. It's a safe place to be scared," the actress explains. "I've seen all the Friday the 13ths and Holloweens."
.......In I Know What You Did Last Summer, Gellar plays Helen, a local beauty queen running away from a madman with a hook for a hand. This is a far cry from what Buffy would do in the same situation. "I got notes that said I looked too athletic when I was running away. It looked too much like I could beat him up, but toward the end I got the hang of it. The six inch heels and the dress helped."
.......After her film work, returning to the Buffy set was not as easy as Gellar would have assumed. "The schedule seemed really hard on me. There never seemed to be enough time. There never were enough takes. I didn't get the script far enough in advance. Then I thought 'I used to be on a soap. I used to learn a script a day!' How quickly we forget."
.......However, Gellar is thankful for her early days on the daytime drama, All My Children, where she played Kendall Hart, the devious secret daughter of Susan Lucci's Erica Kane. "It was a great training ground," the daytime Emmy winner says. "There is nothing harder than soaps. You get the script a day in advance, you rehearse it once or twice and you get one take, maybe two, and that is it. Contrary to popular belief we did not have cue-cards."
.......Don't let her good looks fool you, Gellar is probably the toughest actress on prime time. Having studied the defensive art of Tae Kwon Do for years, she is an accomplished brown belt. But competition and physical activities come naturally for Gellar. Before her acting career took off, competitive figure skating was another outlet. "I was going to school, acting, doing Tae Kwon Do and skating. I would get up in the morning, go to the ice rink, then go to school, then go to auditions, then go to Tae Kwon Do. I was cracking. I had to pick two things, and, of course, one of them had to be school. Basically, I chose the one that was my big love."
.......Sitting at home on her first day off in a year waiting for the cable guy to arrive, Gellar is very excited about Buffy's second season on the air. "The network is letting us go a little further and push the envelope a little more which is exciting to us. We can be a little darker and a little edgier."
.......Gellar admits to having some kinship with the character she has portrayed so far. "As an actor, you can always bring parts of yourself to characters, but hopefully it's only a small portion of it, and the rest is a new character that you developed. Helen (in I Know What You Did Last Summer) is probably the farthest from me I've ever played." She relates best to the quick-witted heroine she plays on television. A Buffy experience she swears has been blown out of proportion took place at Knott's Berry Farm. As a vampire jumped out to scare her she greeted him to a karate chop. "The guy grabbed me and I hit him, it was a reaction," Gellar confesses.
.......Although there were no vampires roaming the halls of Gellar's junior high, she does sympathize with Buffy's experience at Sunnydale High. "My junior high school was like Buffy's. I was kind of a nerd. I didn't have many friends, and I was an outcast. But I think Buffy is an amazing role model because the one thing that I was able to do at my high school was be an individual. The problem with most high schools is they don't stress individuality. Buffy shows girls it's okay to be different."
.......Not originally offered the vampire-slaying role, Sarah Michelle fought to play Buffy. Gellar was asked to read for the part of Cordelia Chase, the high school beauty. "I really wanted Buffy, but at the time I had long dark hair and very light skin. I kept trying to convince people to let me read for Buffy. They said 'You're not Buffy,' amd I said 'I can be Buffy.'"
.......The New York born actress admits this may have been her most memorable summer to date. "I got to do two big feature films. I got to work with amazing people and made amazing friends. It was an overwhelming summer." A co-star Gellar is happy to call a friend is I Know What You Did Last Summer's Freddie Prinze Jr., who plays Ray. "Freddie is my baby," Gellar says gushingly. While promoting the sequel to Scream, Gellar received quite a surprise from the man she admits she is too busy to call back. "I was really stressed out, really tired, and wasn't eating. I came home from a photo shoot and Freddie and five of his best friends were cooking me dinner."
.......Gellar probably won't have any time off in the near future either. Soon to be seen in the highly anticipated Scream 2, she has the perfect solution to her problem. "I want the 'Buffy-in-a-coma' episode. I was on daytime for two and a half years and I got two days in a coma. I want a coma episode. Mexico here I come!"