........Sarah Michelle Gellar has been working so hard since she was 4, the busy actress just recently found time for her first big Hollywood week.
........"I went to the opening night of Rent, the premiere of House of Yes and the premiere of I Know What You Did Last Summer," the 20-year-old says, sounding both pleased with herself and a tad guilty. "It's just not me. It's not my life, that's the thing. It's my job. I work very hard to maintain a separate life outside of what I do."
........It would take the supernatural powers of the title character she plays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer for someone with a schedule like Gellar's to carve out the time for a separate life. She's deeply buried in the second season of the WB network's critically acclaimed teen horror series and stars in two scary movies, one out now and one due before the end of the year. I Know What You Did Last Summer has been a top box office attraction for four weeks, and the droolingly anticipated Scream 2, which Miramax Films has scheduled for the widest release in the company's history on Dec. 12.
........Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn't your typical 9-to-5 TV grind. Between stints of hormonal confusion and high school clique wars, Buffy kickboxes demons from hell and wrestles with werewolves. In ...Last Summer, another teen-horror offering, New York native Gellar plays small-town beauty queen Helen Shivers, who gets involved in a cover-up that has frightening implications.
........Toned to perfection, Gellar, who is just shy of a martial arts brown belt, fits a vigorous exercise regimen into her schedule. "What happened was, I was going to school, acting, skating and doing tae kwon do all at one time," she recalls. "No human being can do that, and my mom's rule always was, if my grades got below an A-, I had to stop working. So she sat me down one day and said, 'You can pick two things, you can't do them all.' 'And,' she said, 'school has to be one of them.' So I chose acting. And now it's great, 'cause I get to use the tae kwon do in the show, and I'm learning kick boxing and boxing and street fighting. That, and I run around like a lunatic. Example: The last of the four main actors cast in ...Last Summer, Gellar joined costars Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five), Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr. at the film's North Carolina location the day the first Buffy episode aired last spring. She started filming Scream 2, in which she plays one of Neve Campbell's expendable sorority sisters, the day after ...Summer wrapped. Of course, two seasons worth of Buffy episodes had to be squeezed in, too. "It's been confusing, there's no question," she admits. "I've definitely been tired; Buffy is a real difficult show to shoot. I never have a day off, sometimes they don't finish shooting until 2 a.m., and I have to be there at 5 some mornings. Basically, I'd work Monday to Thursday on Buffy, then I'd start Scream on Friday, wouldn't finish until Sunday and just basically go straight to Buffy, shower and start work there. But it's something I want to do, and 20 years old is kind of the time to do it. I can sleep when I'm dead."
........It took a bit of counseling from director Jim Gillespie to remind Gellar that Helen, though more capable than your average horror movie beauty queen, was still no vampire slayer. "When I first got down there, I was still in Buffy mode," she admits. "Like, 'Here comes the bad guy. Give him your right, then a left!' Jim was like, 'Uh, Sarah, you're looking too athletic. This isn't a triathlon here.' I had to do things like untie my shoes or put pebbles in them when I'd run. I got a little more used to it, but I'm so used to being the aggressor in a fight scene, I couldn't see being defensive and then just flailing."
........Gellar is proud of the physically formidable yet emotionally vulnerable image she projects on TV every week. "When I was growing up -- and not to knock these shows -- I watched Mallory worry about her dates and her boyfriends on Family Ties, I watched Blair on Facts of Life," she recalls. "There were no strong female characters. I'm sorry, Tootie was not a role model, y'know? But with Buffy, we're showing real situations. Buffy is not the prettiest girl in her school, she's not the most popular, she's not the smartest. She makes mistakes, she makes good decisions and bad decisions, she's dealing with real situations that we put on a fantasy level."
Gellar recognizes that she runs the risk of getting typed as a scream queen. But aside from hating how her own cries sound, she's not too concerned about it. "It's random that I've worked three things in a row this way," she says of her horror resume. "It's happened because, of all the scripts that have been offered to me, these have been the three most interesting, diverse roles. And y'know, if I get stuck doing work like this, God help me I should be so lucky."