Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Where now for Buffy?

John Patterson wonders if Sarah Michelle Gellar can stake her claim on the big-screen world, now that Buffy has been slain

Saturday April 3, 2004

The Guardian

Whatever their faults, the Scooby-Doo movies really do benefit from note-perfect casting. Matthew Lillard’s rangy, long-limbed idiocy is Shaggy to the cringing, cowering nth degree. Fred could only be played by a supersonic bore on a Redford scale of self-absorption, and so it is we find Freddie Prinze Jr comfortably ensconced in that role. No one ever remembers who plays sensible, speccy Velma - the Billie Jean King of Saturday morning TV - but every eight-year-old male of my acquaintance in 1973 wanted, and wanted very badly, to snog the very Alice-band off of Miss Daphne, now played, to an awesome degree of switched-on winsomeness and ditziness, by the nicest girl in town, Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Gellar is a quintessentially 1990s, post-feminist feminist heroine: proud to be a good girl, all homework completed before suppertime, kind words for her nerdiest friends, make-up just so, and not a hair out of place. All that - plus she stays up nights vanquishing evil and stomping the beastliest monsters from the very guts of Hell. OK, that’s Buffy, not SMG, but will the actress ever be able to shake the dust of such a wonderful character from her well-shod heels? This is her last season behind the big spike, so we can expect some tinkering with the screen persona in the near future.

She’s messed with it before, and provocatively indeed. In 1999’s Cruel Intentions, she was the high school manipulator-in-chief - a 180-degree turnaround from Buffy. Her girl-on-girl snog-lesson with spacey Selma Blair ("and now with the tongue...") was as nothing to the moment when she offered herself to her own half-brother Ryan Phillipe with the words, "and you can put it anywhere..." This utterance prompted a nation of male American virgins of junior high school age to faint en masse into their popcorn.

So, she got the power. But where will she go from here? She is so thoroughly a fixture of the small screen that one wonders if she can shine as brightly on the big one. Sarah Michelle is the inheritor of a strictly televisual legacy: she is the linear descendent of some of the, uh, goodest girls on American network TV, from Mary Tyler Moore to Carol Burnett; sharp, funny and kind-hearted, but destined, like Luke Perry or Jenny Garth, to remain a TV personality. I hope not, but I think so nonetheless.

Career high Her obituary will say "Buffy" long before it prints the words "Sarah Michelle Gellar".

Career low She’s careful in her choices, so nothing too horrible has tainted her - yet.

Need to know A brown belt in tae kwon do. Do not mess with the vampire-slayer.

The last word "I am militant about drugs. You want to do ’em? You’re out of my life." Hark at Li’l Miz Zero Tolerance.