The Girl's Got Bite: The Original Unauthorized Guide to Buffy's World

by Kathleen Tracy

  The last of the four main characters to be cast in Last Summer, Gellar admits she was still carrying around Buffy’s attitude when she first started filming. “In the beginning, the director would have to tell me that I wasn’t running a triathlon: ‘You can’t kick the guy.’ It was also hard just because of my training and what I had gotten used to on a day-to-day basis. I’m so used to being the aggressor in a fight.”

  She’s not kidding. Once, while visiting Knott’s Berry Farm, an L.A.-area amusement park that hosts annual Halloween “Fright Nights,” Sarah punched a park employee/vampire who jumped out of the shadows to scare her. “Yeah, the guy grabbed me and I hit him,” Sarah says, chagrined. “It was just an instinctive reaction.”

  The day production wrapped on I Know What You Did Last Summer in June, Sarah flew to Atlanta to begin work on Scream 2, in which she plays one of Neve Campbell’s sorority sisters. She had got the movie by pure coincidence. Although she’d already been cast in I Know What You Did Last Summer, writer Kevin Williamson had never met her. After running into her on a plane, Williamson, who also wrote Scream 2, was professionally smitten, and recommended Sarah to director Wes Craven for the part of Cici, a character who doesn’t make it to the end of the film.

  “I didn’t have to push very hard because Wes fell in love with her, too,” Williamson says. “It’s a juicy little part, and she’s rocking! I want her in every one of my movies because you know when you hire her to do a job she’s not going to be in the trailer complaining about everything. She’s going to be right out there giving you the tenth take in the freezing cold.”

  For all of Williamson’s high praise, Gellar was a basket case when she got to the location. “I got down there and was so intimidated and in awe, that the day before we finished the read-through I literally called my manager and said, ‘I’m going to pack my bags. I’m going to be fired. I’m coming home.’ Actually, I do that at every job after a read-through. I did that at the first read-through for the first season of Buffy—and after the second season I still thought I was going to be fired.” It was an actor’s version of buyer’s anxiety. “This is what I’ve waited for my whole life. But I’m worried that something’s going to go wrong. I keep thinking I’m going to mess it up somehow.”

  Scream 2 was still in production when it was time to report back to Buffy. Unlike the All My Children producers, who had prevented Sarah from doing outside projects, Whedon and the other executives worked around Sarah’s movie schedule. “Basically, I’d work on Buffy Monday through Thursday, then I’d start Scream on Friday, wouldn’t finish until Sunday, and just basically go straight to Buffy, shower and start work there.

  And as Sarah can attest, filming Buffy is exhausting enough by itself. “It’s a real difficult show to shoot, and I never have a day off. Sometimes they don’t finish shooting until two A.M. and I have to be there at five some mornings. So there were times when I did feel as if I was in over my head. One day I was driving to work. I had the top down and I noticed people were looking at me. I look down and realize I’m only wearing a slip because I had forgotten to put my dress on. But I’ve learned I can juggle things.”

  During each of her Buffy hiatuses, Gellar has continued to make films. During 1998 she filmed two movies which were released in 1999. The first was the romantic comedy Simply Irresistible, opposite Sean Patrick Flannery, playing a mediocre chef on the verge of losing the restaurant she inherited, whose life is transformed by a mysterious seafood salesman. He gives her a magical crab and suddenly she is able to concoct delicious desserts that act as culinary aphrodisiacs, enabling her to save her restaurant and find true love. A soufflé of a film, critics uniformly dismissed Simply Irresistible as very resistible, but the unflattering reviews didn’t hurt Gellar’s cinematic bankability.

  That same year she once again teamed up with Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions, based on Choderlos de Laclos’ classic French novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. This time around, the film is set in an upper-crust Manhattan prep school, with Gellar and Phillippe as stepsiblings Kathryn Merteuil and Sebastian Valmont, who wager a bet on whether or not he can take the virginity of the pure Annette Hargrove, played by Phillippe’s real-life wife, Reese Witherspoon. If he loses, Merteuil gets his classic 1956 Jaguar; if he wins, he gets to have his way with his stepsister, who brazenly tells him, “You can put it anywhere you like.” Clearly Sarah was looking to remind her fans that there’s more to her professionally than just the upright and honorable Buffy. “It was important to prove I can do other things,” Sarah explains. “Buffy is only one step in my career.”

  Tom Gliatto of People called it “a brainless good time for the WB set.” Entertainment Weekly’s Troy Patterson noted: “Here is the fourth screen adaptation of a novel derided centuries ago as ‘a picture of the most odious immorality.’ Director Roger Kumble is less concerned with exploring the souls of cynical libertines than with plumbing the nuances of teenage lesbian tongue-kissing. The picture is odious, sure, but its first hour is so zippily titillating as to make for tasty trash.”

  Critical notices notwithstanding one of the best parts of Cruel Intentions for Sarah was winning the Best Screen Kiss at that year’s MTV Movie Awards—for a kiss with Selma Blair. “That was the coolest thing,” she says.

  Although Gellar took a break from acting during her hiatus in 1999, she was hardly idle. In between traveling to Europe to promote Cruel Intentions, Sarah donated a week of her time to Habitat for Humanity in the Dominican Republic where she helped build a house for a homeless family. “I made a very good windowsill until someone stepped on it, and then I had to redo it because it wasn’t dry,” she recalls. “I learned how to lay floor. I mixed a ton of cement. I’ve never had calluses like that on my hands. And my fingers were just bloody. I guess I’ve never done an honest day’s labor in my life, apparently.”

  In the summer of 2002 Gellar appeared as Daphne in the film version of the classic cartoon Scooby-Doo. Whereas Daphne was the damsel in distress in the original series, Gellar gave her a new-millennium makeover in assertiveness. “It upset me that Daphne was always getting captured, so when the script had her being proactive and strong I immediately wanted to do it,” says Gellar, who admits she wanted to do the film because she had grown up watching the cartoon series. “I loved that Scooby wasn’t gender-specific. Cartoons like G.I. Joe and Transformers were for boys, while My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake were for girls. Scooby had something for everyone and I knew the movie would, too.”

  The film, which co-starred Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred, Linda Cardellini as Velma, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, and a computer-generated Scooby-Doo surprised Hollywood by raking in $54 million at the box office its opening weekend, making it Gellar’s first bona-fide film hit.

  “There are certain movies in Hollywood that have a buzz about them, and this was one of them,” Sarah told Desmond Sampson in Crème. “But because I work nine months a year on Buffy, for me to take my three-month hiatus and do a movie, it has to be something that I really want to do, something I really want to be a part of, something that’s worth sacrificing my time for. Scooby-Doo was.”

  But working on the film meant double-duty for Gellar, who spent most of the fifth season of Buffy commuting back and forth from Australia. “I would spend two weeks shooting Buffy in L.A. and then fly down to Australia for two weeks to shoot Scooby-Doo.” By that time Gellar and Prinze were openly living together, and rented a beach home in Queensland during filming. “Freddie and I stayed in a solar-powered house in Tanglaoma, which is a really great idea in theory, except it was winter and the house was in the trees,” she recalled to Crème’s Sampson. “There was sunlight four hours a day. Forget doing laundry, we couldn’t get enough hot water to take a bath.”

  Director Raja Gosnell says the fans went crazy whenever Sarah was in the country. “Sarah is the preeminent teen star in Australia as well as America. There were these Japanese tour boats that would drive past their house so people could take pict
ures even if they weren’t there. We needed added security for our group whenever they came out with us at night.”

  Gellar says one of the best things about Scooby-Doo was her belief that she was going to make MTV awards history. At one point in the film, after Daphne switches bodies with Fred, Sarah has a scene where she kisses co-star Linda Cardellini. “The whole time I was making this movie—and I don’t really care about awards, but this award I care about—I was literally thinking, ‘I’m gonna win this twice. I wonder if there’s even been a two-time ‘Best Kiss’ winner?’ And then they cut it out of the movie and I watched my chances of a second ‘Best Kiss’ prize—of possibly being the only one to win that twice—just disappear. I was crushed.”

  Next up for Gellar will be the Scooby-Doo sequel and the comedy A Semester Abroad, for Deep River Productions, about a tough girl from Queens who earns a scholarship to study in a highly regarded but somewhat stuffy British school where her street edge grates her decidedly more refined schoolmates.

  Sarah steadfastly maintains that her silence about her personal life is simply a way to protect her own personal space in a business where loss of anonymity is an accepted price to pay for fabulous wealth and fame. Her desire to be in control is most noticeably reflected in her jealously guarded privacy. “Here’s my thing: I made a rule way back when I was on All My Children that there would be a part of me I put out to the public and a part I keep to myself. This has caused me problems. It has caused me to lose interviews. But I need a life to go home to that only my close friends know about. I am sooo proud of my house, but you will never see it in InStyle. I don’t think people should know what my bedroom looks like. We give away too much information.

  “I have to have a life outside my career. I have to have things that are sacred to me. My fans have Buffy and they have my films. I think they respect that I need to have some privacy.”

  For a long time, Gellar kept mostly mum on the subject of her relationship with Freddie Prinze Jr., though their romance might have been one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets. Her first acknowledgment that he was perhaps more than just a buddy came when she admitted in an interview that Prinze worried whether she was wasting away. “During the time I was promoting Scream 2, I was really stressed out and exhausted and just not eating. One night I got home to find Freddie and several of his friends in my kitchen cooking up a feast. Then they wrapped up the leftovers to make sure I would have plenty of food in the refrigerator,” she related, adding, “Freddie’s my baby.”

  Although Sarah won’t comment on specific romances she has had in the past, she will talk about her philosophy on relationships in general: “I do think you have to have some compromise to make a relationship work but I would never change drastically. You have to be true to yourself and I think if you’re not happy with what you’re doing, you’ve crossed the line. You shouldn’t be going out with someone just to say you’re going out with them. You’re going out with them, hopefully, because you enjoy who they are and they enjoy who you are.”

  When Sarah was still on All My Children, there was a curious incident involving co-star Windsor Harmon. Once during an interview, Harmon announced that he and Sarah were dating and a romantic item.

  “Sarah was outraged,” says an acquaintance. “But whether she was outraged because it was not true, or because he had let the cat out of the bag, nobody was completely sure. In the end, most people figured that Windsor was just trying to up his profile by attaching himself to Sarah. As it happened, he left the show shortly after that, moved to California, joined The Bold and the Beautiful, and is now married with a family.”

  Sarah was once quoted as saying, “Right now, because all I do is work, the only people you meet are actors, and I’d rather not date actors.” Apparently she changed her mind because, after months of discreet dating, Freddie Prinze moved into Sarah’s house in 2000. “I met him first as an actor and I respected his work—and then it went from there.”

  One thing anyone involved with an actor must endure is seeing their partner in cinematic love scenes, such as Buffy’s erotic escapades with Spike. Gellar says it’s not so easy being in the scenes, either. “To be honest, it is truly the unsexiest thing in the world. David Boreanaz [who played Angel] and I were the worst. We would do horrible things to each other. Like eat tuna fish and pickle before we kissed. If he had to unbutton my shirt or my trousers I would pin them or sew them together to make it as hard as I could.” Not surprisingly, Prinze prefers not to watch, although Gellar adds dryly, “Oddly enough, he liked my girl-on-girl scenes from Cruel Intentions.”

  Gellar and Freddie were married on September 1, 2002. She admits that many of her friends are starting families. “It does make you think about it,” she told Desmond in Crème. “Ultimately, I think everyone’s dream is to be happy, be fulfilled, get married, and have kids. Having kids is such a huge step in your life, though. We both want children. It has to be at the right time, when both people are ready for it. So, when we’re both ready, we will. Would I stop working? I don’t know. I mean, obviously, I think it depends on what I was doing and where I was in my life.”

  Gellar is aware of the chord Buffy has struck with the audience, especially females. “Everyone says it’s such a burden to be a role model. But they’re looking at it the wrong way. It’s an honor. The only thing is, it’s important that there’s a certain line of separation where I’m seen as Sarah and not Buffy.

  “I know when I was growing up how important certain teen icons were to me. They respond to Buffy because for years we didn’t have a character young girls could look up to,” she explained during a TV Guide interview. “Mallory on Family Ties was an idiot. Carol on Growing Pains wasn’t happy being smart; she wanted to be popular. Those were not role models. And then you have the actresses who are so physically perfect you can never be like them. Buffy is not the smartest or the most beautiful. She’s kind of awkward, but she is okay with who she is. The most important lesson we need to learn in our formative years is that it’s okay to be an individual. It’s okay to be you. And the guys see Buffy as a take-charge, kick-ass girl who has never lost her femininity. The ones who are threatened by that don’t watch our show.”

  Gellar is not only a role model on-screen, but off-screen as well. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I’ve never done drugs,” she said in a Bliss interview. Which is not to say she isn’t adventurous in her own way, with piercings, in each ear and a pierced belly-button. She’s also fond of tattoos. “I have a Chinese symbol for integrity on my back, and one on my ankle, which is a heart and a knife. I find tattoos addictive. I’m not worried about scarring my body; if I don’t like them when I’m older I’ll just get rid of them.”

  Ultimately she believes the reason for the show’s longevity is that its audience continues to relate to it as the characters age and mature. “I think this is very important for keeping the show alive, and our audience has grown with us. I’m very pleased that Buffy’s progression is so clearly charted on the show. We’ve seen her go from a high school student, to her first love, to college, and now she’s a single mother who has to get a job. The things she is doing now—finding yourself and confronting your inner demons—are the things most people do in their mid-twenties.”

  There are still many professional challenges Sarah looks forward to. “I want to do period pieces; I want to be in a Die Hard–type movie; I want to do comedy. But mainly I just want to do good work.”

  Anthony Stewart Head

  When Buffy first premiered in 1997, Anthony Stewart Head was best known for a series of coffee commercials, in which he played a smitten java-lover who woos his equally caffeine-driven neighbor. What a difference a hit series makes. Now Head is indelibly identified with Giles, Buffy’s father-figure Watcher. “It is always nice being recognized for whatever reason, but Buffy is very different from anything I’ve done before, so it’s been really cool.”

  Born in the Camdentown area of North London, Head grew up in nearby
Hampton and trained for the theater at the London Academy of Dramatic Arts. His first role after leaving school was as Jesus in the national tour of Godspell, and over the years Tony has maintained his ties to the theater, appearing in Yonadab at the Royal National Theater in London, Chess, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Rope, and The Heiress. He also donned fishnets and a dress to play Dr. Frank N. Furter in a West End revival of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His brother, Murray Head, is also a well-known British actor, best known for originating the role of Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar.

  In addition to his theater work, Tony has worked steadily in television, amassing a resumé full of credits, including the British series Enemy at the Door, The Detectives, Ghostbusters of East Finchley, and Jonathan Creek. On the big screen, Tony has appeared in A Prayer for the Dying, the 1987 drama that starred Mickey Rourke as an IRA bomber, and 1991’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, starring Sylvia Kristal, who is best known for her soft-porn Emmanuelle movies.

  Even though Head has appeared in his fair share of American series, including guest spots on NYPD Blue and Highlander, and as a regular on Fox’s 1995 sci-fi series VR.5, it was his commercial work for Taster’s Choice that made Tony a household face.

  The budding romance that began in a 1990 commercial featuring Head and actress Sharon Maughan evolved over thirteen different spots that eventually included the woman’s son and ex-husband. Because of the spots’ popularity, there was actually talk of turning the commercials into a television series. Head said scripts were written, but in the end, “the bottom line is, it’s all kind of said in a fifty-second commercial, you know? Unless the scripts that came to us were radically different or somehow managed to expand the characters, there was never really any point in doing it.” Finally Anthony told the producers, “Enough is enough.”