'Buffy' is the Very Model
of a Teenage Vampire Slayer
........Poised as a Parisian model in
a diamond pendant, Sarah Michelle Gellar, aka Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, fields questions with a cool many adults
would, well, kill for. A working actress since the age of 4, she
says the only way to maintain that calm eye in the center of the
Hollywood hurricane is to keep a firm firewall between her public
and private selves. "The most important thing to keeping sane is
to have two really separate lives," she says, "to have a work
life, a life that's out there for everyone to see, and then a
life that's yours, so that when you go home at night, you're
still a regular person."
........Levelheaded words for an
actress barely out of her teens whose career is on a star's
trajectory. Network suits rightfully attribute the cult success
of three-year-old Buffy (the new season premieres Tuesday,
Oct. 5, on The WB network) in no small measure to the young
dynamo who weekly lowers the mortality rate of the fictional
small town of Sunnydale, Calif. They gush over Ms. Gellar."She
has been the kind of team player that any network would love,"
says Brad Turell, executive vice president of publicity and
talent relations at The WB. Calling her one of the top five
actresses in TV, he pays her the ultimate Hollywood compliment
for a young performer: "She's a pro."
........Her writers are no less
effusive. "I've fallen in love with her," says Joss Whedon, the
show's creator and executive producer, referring to Buffy and
Gellar at once. He says the show is a pleasure to work on largely
because of the closeness of everyone on the set.
........Gellar came to Hollywood from
New York at the age of 18 to take her first nighttime dramatic
role in Buffy after making a name for herself playing
Susan Lucci's daughter on the daytime soap opera All My
Children. Coming off a set where a rocky relationship between
the two was well-publicized ("Sometimes two people just shouldn't
work together, and that's an instance where we probably should
not work together again"), Gellar is grateful for the harmony in
her new job. Besides, she says, "They keep me up working 22 hours
a day," with only a small laugh of exaggeration. Most of her
friends are from the set by necessity.
........The native New Yorker, who
attended the Professional Children's School (PCS) in Manhattan,
says her social life has never been what any teen would dub
normal, although she has nothing but gratitude for her experience
as a working child. "I never would have been able to have the
private education that I had," she says, "if I hadn't worked to
afford it." She began her junior high school years at a regular
private school. "It was pretty rough," she says. "If you're not
wealthy, from Park Avenue, you don't fit in, and obviously, I
didn't have those things." From there, she weathered a brief
stint at New York's High School for the Performing Arts (the
school depicted in the film Fame). Although it was a large
school, that wasn't her biggest problem. "They have this theory
that until they've taught you everything that you need to know,
that you can't go out there and work in the arts," she says.
School officials threatened to fail her, despite her good grades,
when she took time off for auditions. Within months, she ended up
at PCS, alongside other working teens such as Macaulay Culkin.
"Everybody was different there," she says, laughing. "Because of
that, everyone had their own niche. They fit in somewhere." She
remembers PCS as a great learning experience. "If someone didn't
like you," she says, "they didn't ostracize you; you guys just
weren't friends."
........Obviously, the experience of
being an outsider is one that has fed her inner life playing a
teenage vampire slayer. "Buffy's not the most popular," she says,
"she's not the smartest in school, and she's an individual. And I
think that the hardest thing to learn as a teenager is
individuality."
........Individuality will be a
strong theme in the coming season, as The WB spins off one of the
key characters in Buffy, Angel, into a show of his own.
"Buffy's going to leave her boyfriend, she's going to leave her
mentor, Giles, and she's going to learn to experience things on
her own. Hopefully, that will be something that a lot of young
girls and boys can relate to."
........Gellar takes her status as a
role model seriously. "Buffy is an incredible role model," she
says. "I wish growing up that there were characters like that
that I could watch."
........Now that the show and The WB
are gaining so much popularity with young audiences, she pays
attention in her private life as well. "I'm not going to drink in
public if I'm not 21," she says, "and I'm not going to say things
that are inappropriate for my age.... You're just not going to
see me at the Viper Room on a Friday night; it's just not going
to happen."