Sarah Michelle Gellar

What Buffy did next

Sarah Michelle Gellar buried Buffy and never looked back. She tells Martyn Palmer about life, love and Scooby-Doo 2

The day after she finished filming Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the very last time, Sarah Michelle Gellar started work on Scooby-Doo 2. It was, she says, best to try and keep busy. After eight years, and seven groundbreaking seasons, Gellar called things quits with an understandably heavy heart but an overwhelming belief that the time was right to finally move on. But even now, a year later, she hasn’t really taken it in. “I finished Buffy on April 15 and started Scooby on April 16 and everyone kept saying, ‘you don’t have time to mourn, you don’t have time to understand ...’ But I thought, ‘you know, it’s better this way ...’

“I got to pack up and go somewhere new and different, but familiar at the same time. I was with the guys from the first Scooby movie and it was a fun experience. And that was a good thing coming straight after Buffy, just what I needed. But I’m not sure that I’ve grasped the fact that I really have left Buffy behind.”

It’s hardly surprising. She joined the series as an 18-year-old, moving from her home on the east coast to Los Angeles half-expecting the show to be canned before she had time to unpack the removals van. Everybody warned her to expect the worst.

“Everyone told me, ‘don’t worry honey, you’ll get another pilot next year ...’,” she remembers. “Literally, everyone acted as if I was very lucky to have this job and take my money and be able to pay my rent and then next year I would get a real show. That’s how everyone responded.”

As a TV spin-off from a not-very-successful film (which starred Kirsty Swanson in the title role) Buffy - and Gellar herself - defied the odds. The premise did indeed sound too off-the-wall to work - a young student, Buffy, lives in Sunnydale, an average Californian town except for the unfortunate fact that it’s located on top of the Hellmouth, which spews forth hordes of undead who cause havoc. Luckily, Buffy is The Slayer, the chosen one from each generation who can dispatch a vampire quicker than choosing a new purse.

Buffy was funny, sexy, clever, scary and pleasingly self-aware (her team of hipster ghostbusters often referred to themselves as “the Scooby gang”). Despite the fantastic content, the show - overseen by creator Joss Whedon - dealt with real-life issues: displaced teens, bullying, sex, loneliness, love and death. The reward for its witty approach was a loyal following of millions around the globe.

As each season passed, Gellar became a bigger and bigger star in the US and further afield. She began using her brief hiatus from the show to make movies, with varying results - there was Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer and the first Scooby-Doo. There was also the excellent Cruel Intentions, a peppy, preppy adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuse where she convincingly played an amoral viper, betting her step-brother Ryan Phillippe that he couldn’t bed a virginal Reese Witherspoon.

Now, of course, instead of trying to cram in one big-screen role a year, the post-Buffy Gellar is concentrating entirely on movies. I catch up with her in Tokyo, where she is currently filming an English language remake of the Japanese horror film Ju-On. Even among the recent wave of unsettling horror movies from the Far East, Ju-On is something pretty extreme - a haunted house tale turned on its head, featuring terrifying pale blue children who appear from nowhere and scream like tortured wildcats. Promisingly, the remake - entitled The Grudge - is being made by the original writer/director, Takashi Shimizu, and it’s still set in Japan.

Gellar and I meet in a suite on the 37th floor of a luxury hotel with a head-spinning view of central Tokyo all around us. Dressed in brown cords, a pale blue T-shirt and a tan leather jacket - a Valentine’s Day present from husband and Scooby-Doo co-star Freddie Prinze Jr - she is relaxed and friendly and obviously enjoying her time in the city.

“It’s amazing - the food, the shops, the people, everything. You know, as an actor your dream is to be a gypsy and go and live in different places, and to be in Japan, I mean, look at this city, it’s just fantastic. I’m working with a Japanese director, a Japanese crew, I have a translator and it’s a fabulous experience.”

The only downside is that Prinze, her husband of some 18 months, hasn’t been able to join her because of work commitments. “Timing-wise, this one didn’t work out the way that we planned,” she explains. “He was going to do a film and then it didn’t happen and so he was going to come out here. But he had all these other obligations - he sold a pilot to MTV and then he had this other MTV film they hired him to write. And then he signed this other deal just when he had booked the tickets to come here. This has been the longest we’ve been apart and I’ve missed him a lot.”

They first met in 1997 when they both starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but it wasn’t until three years later that they started dating. Being married, she says, has changed her.

“Absolutely it has. I think that’s probably true of any woman. It’s not that you lose your identity, but there’s a security that comes with having a partner and I think if somebody asks me my definition of marriage, it’s partnership.

“It’s about compromise and a love of shared things. We went to Puerto Rico for Christmas and spent two weeks, just the two of us, on our own. And it was wonderful. Romantic and fun. Freddie is my best friend as well as my husband. To be able to do those things with your best friend is the luckiest thing.

“And to constantly learn new things about your partner, new likes, and to discover new places together, well, I just feel that I’m very fortunate. And I’m fortunate on a second level: because of what I do, it’s odd to have that sort of normality.”

Her outlook on her professional life has changed too, she feels. After years of a very regimented, physically demanding show - she did much of her own high-kicking stunt work on Buffy - she wants to have fun. And, let’s not forget, she has been in the business for most of her life - starting out as an eight-year-old making TV commercials and, at 15, working on a daytime soap back home in New York.

Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed was fun from start to finish, she insists. But why do a sequel?

“Because I signed the contract!” she fires back, laughing.

While the first film adaptation of the 1970s Hanna Barbera cartoon was hardly a critical hit when it was released two years ago, it was commercially very successful. The principal cast - Gellar as sleuthing hotpot Daphne, her husband Freddie as gang leader Fred, Linda Cardellini as geeky Velma, and Matthew Lillard as stoner coward Shaggy - all return, as does the computer-generated Scooby. Last time round, Rowan Atkinson was the baddie, but second time out, the Mystery Inc crew are up against a slew of CGI foes, monsters from the original cartoon like the Pterodactyl Ghost and the Skelemen. There’s also some very funny support from Seth Green and Alicia Silverstone. It’s all good, relatively clean fun, but Gellar isn’t about to claim it taxed her acting skills.

“You know, this business is hard,” she says. “It’s hard to pack up and leave your home for a long time and you basically find yourself living with these random people, and so to go somewhere with Freddie and Matt and the rest and that’s fun time. We had a good time making this and hopefully there are a lot of kids out there who will enjoy it.”

Gellar turns 27 next month and she claims to be happy and contented. There’s plenty of time for heavier roles and she refuses to fret about the future.

“If I was scared of stuff like that I don’t know that I would have moved to LA and done Buffy in the first place. I’ve had eight years of probably one of the best television shows, in my opinion, in the history of TV. And I would never try to replicate that.

“People say, ‘are you trying to move so far away from it?’ and it’s like, ‘why would I ever try to do something the same?’ Nothing’s ever going to be that way. I’ve had so much success and so many great things happening to me in a short life, not just professionally but personally too, and I just feel very, very lucky.”

Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed is released on Friday; the original Ju-On is out on July 2

http://www.scoobydoo2.co.uk

28 March 2004