TV's Vampire Slayer Looks to Stretch Her
Acting Ability with Film Role

........When people call Sarah Michelle Gellar a real pro, they might be referring to her lengthy acting career, which has spanned at least 15 of her 21 years. They might also be thinking about how busy she is, juggling her role as Buffy in the hugely successful TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a nonstop film career that includes a starring role in Cruel Intentions, which opens today. Maybe they're just commenting on what a good little actress she is. But, if you want to see a real pro in action, you should have seen this young actress during a recent three-day media junket to promote the new movie. Gellar was down, but not out, with a bad case of the flu. She managed to steel herself the first day of the junket for 65, (count 'em,!) 65 TV interviews. The next day, she was scheduled to sit for interviews with newspaper writers from early morning until late in the afternoon. She could have canceled due to her illness, but she didn't. Just as the last interviewer of the day was being led into her hotel suite, he overheard her say to her publicist, "I'm so glad the interviews are over; now I can just go home and collapse in bed." Her embarrassed publicist sheepishly informed her that there was one last interview to endure, and then she could go home and collapse in bed. Without so much as a hint of disappointment, Gellar stood straight up, flashed a big smile and greeted the last interviewer like he was the person she had been anxiously awaiting her whole life.

........Now that's a real pro.

........"She unquestionably is the most professional actor I've ever worked with," said Roger Kumble, who wrote and directed Cruel Intentions, the fourth film adaptation of the classic French novel of deceit and sexual manipulation, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. This time around, the story has been updated to present-day Manhattan, where two vicious, amoral and conniving high school-age step-siblings (Gellar and Ryan Phillippe) decide to pass the time during summer vacation by ruining the lives of two young women (Reese Witherspoon and Selma Blair). "Frankly, when I was writing the screenplay, I pictured the character as being played by someone like Glenn Close, only 30 years younger," Kumble said. "Sarah knew the producer from when they worked together on the movie 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' and he asked me to look at her stuff. I looked at everything she ever did and I found what I was looking for in her work as Kendall Hart on All My Children. She was horrifying in that role, and I mean that in a great way! She scared me. But I wasn't sure she was up to doing another nasty character like that. She is so loved by everyone on 'Buffy' and this would be such a risk. But she said she was an actress and that's what actresses do."
........Gellar, who speaks at a breakneck clip without ever seeming flighty, said it wasn't simply a matter of wanting to play this role. She had to play this role. "Yes, it's part of a career strategy," she explained. "If I waited any longer to show people I could stretch as an actor, it probably would be too late because no one would want to see me in anything other than a Buffy role. If you do any role long enough, nobody wants to see you as anything else. It's important for me to prove to people that I can do this other character. I enjoy playing Buffy, but I want to show that I can play the other end of the spectrum. And this is as far from Buffy as you can get."

........FAME, WE'RE GONNA LIVE FOREVER

........When you are on as many magazine covers, and are the subject of as many feature stories as Gellar, there are bound to be a few facts that are not quite right. For the record, her parents split when she was about 7, and she was raised by her mother. She won't even discuss her father. The family was not well-to-do, but Gellar earned an academic scholarship to an exclusive private school in New York City. "Unfortunately, the scholarship child does not fare very well at these kinds of schools," she said, with a bit of pain still resonating in her voice. "Adding to that, I worked to subsidize the scholarship. That made me different, and different is a very bad thing to be in junior high." That experience, she said, helped her create the character she plays in Cruel Intentions. "I knew those people," she said, unsmiling.
........When it came time for high school, she enrolled in the performing arts school featured in the movie and TV show Fame but dropped out after only two months. "I hated it; I thought it was the most horrible school I had ever been to. The fact that they put me in their alumni newsletter makes me ill." She transferred to the Professional Children's School, where being different was normal. "It was about being an individual," she said. "They wanted you to be an individual."
........Gellar already was a professional actress by this time, appearing in several TV movies and her Emmy-winning role on the daytime soap All My Children, playing Susan Lucci's daughter. After leaving the soap, she moved to Los Angeles and 'pounded the pavement' in search of work. Less than a year after arriving in town, she got the role of Buffy, although she originally agreed to play a smaller part in the series. "It was so well-written that I just wanted to be a part of the show, no matter how small the role." She is now in the middle of a five-year TV contract, and she said she will continue doing films during her breaks with an eventual goal of becoming a full-time movie actress. "It's not like I have any definite long-term master plan," she said, "but I do want to keep playing older roles. I'm probably done playing high school girls in movies."

........FIRMLY PLANTED FEET

........Gellar is unquestionably one of the hottest young stars in Hollywood, despite the sinking of her last film, the poorly reviewed Simply Irresistible. Her films before that, Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer, fared much better. Director Kumble thinks she will have a long career in Hollywood. "She's got it all," he said. "She's beautiful and has a way of expressing herself on screen that makes her fun to watch."
........Assuming it is a long career, and knowing that the career started when she was a 6-year-old doing commercials, one wonders how she can stay grounded. It is something she also thinks about. "It is very tricky," she said after pondering the question. "You have to find that balance in your life. I do it by maintaining two separate lives. I don't want to be defined by my work. When I go home at night, I have a completely separate life. I keep my personal life very, very private, much to the dismay and confusion of people who always think I'm hiding something. I'm not hiding anything," she added. "I just need to be Sarah when I'm at home. You can't be Buffy all the time, or you end up so wrapped up in that other identity that you can't find your way back."
........Gellar said she has never gotten used to seeing her face on magazine covers and she tries not to let this fame thing take control of her life. "There are trade-offs to this life, and the loss of anonymity is one of them," she said. "I understand that and I can deal with that. I can't listen to people in this business who complain about that all the time. If you don't like the fame part of this life, don't get into this life. Just stop whining."

........Spoken like a real pro.