Premiere - 10/2000

The Websites
are out there...

........"My agents have been hounding me for years, saying,'You don't understand how downloaded you are!'" Gellar says with a laugh as she sits in her trailer on the Santa Monica lot where Buffy is filmed. She's finally beginning to see their point; in fact, she's about to launch her own official website. (Though it doesn't currently have a domain title - someone else already owns Gellar's name on the Internet - it will be up before year's end.) Even so, you'd hardly peg this setting as the lair of an Internet queen. It's down-home, not digital: The couch sports fluffy pillows, the desk bears a Canadian first-edition copy of the new Harry Potter book, and the walls are bedecked with snapshots of family and friends, plus matted prints of John Tenniel's 19th-century illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. There's not a computer in sight - no PC, no laptop, not even a Palm.
........Still, the actress figures she owes this trailer to the online community. "I don't think we'd be here if it wasn't for the Net," she says. "It was the Internet that really kicked us off, because that's where this loyal fan base could get together and spread the word." And as the word spread and executive producer Joss Whedon's quirky but smart midseason replacement series became a mainstay on The WB Network, Gellar was able to ride that success onto the big screen with a few hits (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2, Cruel Intentions), one negligible dud (Simply Irresistible), and, upcoming, a low-budget indie drama (director James Toback's Harvard Man).
........Polishing off dinner (eggplant casserole eaten straight from a plastic container) on a rare night when she gets to go home relatively early, Gellar eats slow but talks fast; she's assertive, composed, a workaholic who obviously thinks things through and likes to be in charge. But it doesn't take much to see beyond the collected, crisp, all-pro exterior - to see a young woman, just 23, who's spent the past few years quietly dealing with fears and growing pains. It was like that, for instance, with the Internet: "I loved the fact that it supported our show," she says, "but I got very scared of the Net for a while."
........Small wonder. Her home address was sold on one website, and her wardrobe and weight were ripped on in chat rooms. A hairdresser on Buffy showed Gellar a photo her boyfriend had downloaded: The actress's head on a naked body, in an explicit pose way beyond what you'd see in Playboy. "Of course, my first reaction was, 'My hips are not that big!' " she says. "And then I cried. I felt really violated." Unfortunately, such an experience has become routine for countless celebrities. But even worse for Gellar, Buffy's former stunt coordinator put up a website that, over the course of a rambling 3,000-plus word "parable" about a brave knight, depicted Gellar (whom he dubbed "the spoiled Princess") as self-centered and conniving. "There's no other word except crushing," says Gellar, who was told about the site by Whedon but refuses to read it. "It's one thing to hear people you don't know saying lies about you on the Internet, but when it comes from a disgruntled former employee . . . It really, really, really hurt." She stops. "I would love to take this opportunity to say everything I want to say," she says softly. "But that's getting down to a level that I don't want to get down to."
........But Gellar also found herself enjoying the Internet, using it to plan vacations, check movie times, and even score a great deal on a Fendi bag on eBay. (It appears to be completely genuine, she says, though when she checked out the Gellar memorabilia that was up for auction, she was distressed to discover that on every item purporting to sport her autograph, the signature was counterfeit.) Eventually, Gellar found herself agreeing with her agents: It was time to launch her own website as a way to give out correct information, preview things like the Harvard Man trailer, and auction off legitimate items for charity. Besides, she adds, with an official website she can begin to stop her many online impostors. "Once or twice a week I hear about people pretending to be me," says Gellar, who claims she's never chatted online and doesn't even allow her friends to e-mail her. (She prefers old-fashioned letters.) "If anyone says they have my e-mail address, or they talked to me in a chat room, it's not me. And that's one of the reasons I want to launch a website: I want people to know that there's an official place, and that's the only place I will be." The site, she says, will dispense the real info about a life that has been lived in show business. Raised by a single mother on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Gellar made her acting debut at age four, in a TV movie, and became well-known in the mid-1990s when she won an Emmy for playing the daughter of at-the-time Emmy-less soap opera diva Susan Lucci on All My Children.
........Buffy went on the air in 1997, and for a while her career seemed charmed: She hosted Saturday Night Live at the age of 20, then made her film debut in the unexpected smash I Know What You Did Last Summer. Her next film, Scream 2, also topped the box office charts; last year's Cruel Intentions wasn't as big a hit as the others, but it was highly successful given its modest budget, and it won her two MTV Movie Awards - Best Female Performance and Best Kiss (for her teasing lip-lock with Selma Blair).
........Her winning streak nearly came to a crashing halt with Simply Irresistible. "I thought my career was over," she says, laughing. "I thought I was never going to work again. People said, 'Sarah, everybody goes through this.' And I really didn't understand that. So it was a good lesson, you know?" In the aftermath, she found herself somewhat disenchanted with the movie industry. "I sort of feel like we make movies for two times of year: the summertime, to make mucho, mucho, mucho dinero, and Thanksgiving-to-Christmas for Oscar," she says. "And I think that, unfortunately, it makes filmmakers wary of trying things that are different and going against the grain. And pardon my language, but [James] Toback does not give a fuck."
........Her agents were initially skeptical when Gellar said she wanted to meet the director of such films as Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White. "I think they felt like, 'You - of no-nudity, no-out-there sex scenes - you wanna meet James Toback? Are you insane?" But she met him, loved the script (she plays a Mafia daughter who's also the head cheerleader at Holy Cross), and committed to making Harvard Man, though its uncertain finances meant months of delays, almost to the point where she wouldn't have been able to make any movie on her Buffy hiatus. In the end, though, it took only a few weeks of cross-country commuting to work on the film, in which she has a kinky sex scene in the woods. (Gellar, of course, was fully clothed, though her costar, Adrian Grenier, was wearing only a strategically placed sock.)
........Even the threat of being stuck without a hiatus-movie, she says, was not the tragedy it once would have been."The Sarah of three years ago, or even two years ago, would have flipped out," she admits. "I would have had a heart attack. I used to feel that I had to work-work-work-work-work. But after Simply Irresistible, I know that I shouldn't work just to be working anymore."
........At the moment, she doesn't even have to work on Buffy — at least, not for the rest of the night. Glancing at the clock and noting that it's not even 9 p.m., she grins. "This will be the first time all week I'll be home before the next day," she says. Packing up her belongings, she recaps her new mind-set: embracing the Internet, finding time away from Buffy's long hours to devote to her relationship with beau Freddie Prinze Jr., and using her spare time to work on a low-budget flick without caring where it winds up on the box office chart. "I've learned a lot in the past three years, especially in the past year," she says. "I'm not as scared of everything as I was. I'm not as easily shaken, I'm not as stressed out. I've managed to balance things now." She sighs. "But it's hard. I think people sometimes forget how young I still am."