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by Dennis Hensley
Unlike
most us, Sarah Michelle Gellar already knows exactly how she plans to ring in the
millennium. "I'll be in Australia with a
group of friends," she says excitedly over lunch at a sun-drenched L.A. pasta place. "We're going to start at the
Great Barrier Reef and work our way down the Gold Coast, scuba dive and go to the rain
forest." She looks down over her sunglasses
and serves up a playful smirk. "You didn't expect me to have
an answer for that one, did you?"
Not
really, but then again, anyone who has managed to get where Gellar is at the ripe age of
22, must be something of a go-getter. Not only is she the star of her own
TV series, the increasingly popular and ever-surprising Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
but her movie career is in high gear as well thanks to hits like Scream 2 and Cruel
Intentions. She's also just signed to be a
spokesperson for Mabelline, ironic considering that today, she's sporting jeans, braids
and nary a stitch of makeup. "At least I have on two rubber
bands that match," she boasts, gesturing to her girlish pig-tails. "I had a pink and a green one
on this morning."
Gellar's
journey to this glamorous life got its start in a Manhattan restaurant where she was
discovered by a talent agent when she was just 4 years old. Her first job, a TV movie
called Invasion of Privacy, came a week later and was followed by a whole slew of
commercials, most notoriously, a Burger King spot which made history by being the first ad
to deride a competitor by name. "The only part of it that I
understood," Gellar says referring to the resulting lawsuits, "was how come all
my friends were having their birthday parties at McDonald's and I couldn't go?"
Providing
a shoulder to cry on at the time, and ever since, was Gellar's mother, Rosellen, a former
teacher, who raised Sarah on her own in an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "Everything I am is because of
my mom," Gellar says of the woman who shuttled her between auditions, jobs and
school. "She's so cute too. She still cuts out little articles
from like local papers and brings them to me. "Gellar is much less effusive about her
father, who divorced her mother when Sarah was 7, describing him as
"non-existent" in her life. Pressed to say a little more about
him, she opts to quote a line Keanu Reeves used in Parenthood: "You need a license to go
fishing, you need a license to drive, but any butt-reaming asshole can be a father."
So it
was the Gellar women against the world and they were winning, with more jobs to come for
Sarah including the role of teenage Jacqueline Bouvier in the miniseries A Woman Named
Jackie. "That job meant a lot because
I'm psycho-obsessed about JFK, Jr.," Gellar confesses, adding that George founder is
welcome anytime to come play her love interest on Buffy, assuming Joseph Fiennes
doesn't jump at the offer first. "My mother was a teacher at the
church that Jackie worshipped at, and once a year Caroline, John, Jr. and Jackie would go
there and I would take off that morning from school just so I could see John, Jr. He's so
beautiful."
Back
then, Gellar was as much a firecracker of determination as she is now. Still, balancing her career, school
and a social life wasn't always easy. In seventh grade, when most
pre-teens are bugging their parents for more allowance money, Sarah suffered what she
calls her "biggest devastation" when the play that was to be her Broadway debut,
Neil Simon's Jake's Women, closed before it even made it to New York, and when
she returned to her school, friends, nobody would talk to her. High school was a better experience
for Gellar once she settled on the right one."I started out at La Guardia," she
explains referring to the Manhattan-based school of the arts, "and I hated that
school. I got beat up pretty much every day and the education wasn't that good. I left and went to Professional
Children's School which I loved. "An over-achiever even then, Gellar was a straight-A
student, but that didn't keep her from having fun. "Making out in parks is a very
big thing to do in high school when you grow up in New York City," she reveals. "There was a playground right
near my house and the swings saw a lot of action from me." Not that she wasn't getting plenty
of action on-screen at about the same time, playing the conniving Kendall Hart on the
daytime soap All My Children. "That was definitely
head-trippy," she recalls, referring to the fact that Kendall was seven years older
than she was, "to be 16 and have these love scenes with a man old enough to be my
father. I mean, I was married twice and I
hadn't even graduated high school yet."
Amid
rumors that she clashed with her TV mom Susan Lucci, Gellar left All My Children
to pursue bigger and better things in Hollywood, but even with a daytime Emmy under her
arm, the doors didn't exactly fly open. "It was like starting from
scratch again," explains Gellar who promised her mother that if she didn't find work
within a year, she'd start applying to colleges. "You can be very, very famous
in the soap world, then you go into the real world, as I say, and nobody knows who you
are. Up until the day I got Buffy
I was still getting from casting directors, 'Oh, she's not ready, she's too green, she's
too soap.'"
Though
now it's impossible to even imagine anyone else as Buffy, at the time, Gellar had to jump
through hoops too land the part, auditioning more times than she can remember. "On my last audition I went in
and tested and came out and they said, 'We need you to read one more time,' and I just
started to cry," Gellar recalls. "I said, 'I can't do this. You guys are wrecking me. I lived and breathed this for two
weeks. I can't do it anymore. I don't have it in me.' Then the casting director basically
dragged me back in and everybody started laughing and said, 'Congratulations, you got the
role.' Meanwhile, I was still crying and
sniveling."
As any
fan can tell you, the role was a perfect fit. "Buffy 's very similar to me when I was
growing up," Gellar says, "a child in an adult world,
sort of trapped between the two. Does Buffy go to the prom or does
she save the world from demons? My life was similar; do I go to the
slumber party or do I go to my audition?" The show also gives Gellar, who's studied
Tae Kwon Do for four years, a chance to kick a little ass. So how much of Buffy's derring-do is
actually her? "I do as much as I can,"
she says. "My stunt double, Sofia, has a
better butt than I do, so I prefer that if they're going to do butt shots, that they use
Sofia." Gellar breaks into giggles, then
adds, "She's my trainer now though, so I am going to look just like her soon."
In
addition to keeping her fit, on time with her house payments, and on the cover of
magazines, Gellar's success on Buffy has also been her ticket into movie roles. Her track record, thus far, is
heavier on hits than misses, though she got brutally offed in both her '97 releases: Scream
2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer. "Jennifer Love Hewitt and I like
to refer to that as I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer," she says,
joking about the fact that she and her co-star spent most of the movie bounding about in
skimpy tank tops. "Here's a funny story: I hated
the fried food in North Carolina where we shot so I barely ate and I lost an entire cup
size in my breasts. At the end of the movie I had to
match a shot from the beginning, and I had to wear these silicone, squishy thingies, all
pushed in and taped, because I didn't match."
Gellar
did without the squishy thingies in her two '99 releases, though the first, the romantic
comedy Simply Irresistible, could have used a squishy thingy or two. It seemed to vanish from multiplexes
as soon as it arrived. "Before this movie I never
really understood how great actors made bad movies," Gellar says reflectively. "I thought, 'Didn't they read
the script?' and then you realize that it's not just a script, it's not just actors. Sometimes, things get lost in the
translation and it can destroy a movie."
She
fared much better in Cruel Intentions, the shockingly naughty teenage reworking
of Dangerous Liaisons, in which Gellar turned her Buffy image on its
head, playing a coke-snorting, she-devil named Kathryn who promises her studly stepbrother
that if he succeeds in deflowering the new virgin in town she'll let him "put it
anywhere." "I think it was important that I did that part," Gellar laughs,
when asked if she was worried about how her sex-starved character would sit with Buffy
lovers. "Everyone has to remember that
I'm an actress. If you wait too long (to branch out)
people can forget that you do other things, and they won't accept you. "Gellar says
she got the inspiration to play Kathryn from her own junior high school experience in
Manhattan, where almost all of the kids had far more money and far less supervision than
she. "I remember all the girls wore
these Betsey Johnson dresses," she recalls, "and I couldn't afford them new and
so I always bought last season's in the $5 bins. When I got All My Children,
I went out and I bought two dresses from the brand new section and I was so excited."
Cruel
Intentions also served up Gellar's first girl-on-girl kiss, with Zoe, Duncan,
Jack and Jane star Selma Blair. "I kept thinking, 'I have had to kiss guys that I
don't want to kiss. At least Selma is a friend and I
know where she's been'," laughs Gellar. "Afterwards, Selma said, 'I was
nervous that you would think I was a bad kisser.' I said, 'You weren't nervous about
the kiss itself?' She said, 'No. I was just afraid that you'd think I
suck.'" As for the upside of doing kissing
scenes with girlfriends, Gellar can sum it up in three words: No beard burn. Gellar hasn't decided yet what she's
going to do for a big screen encore. "When I read Cruel
Intentions, it just jumped off the page," she says, "and I've learned that
you need to wait for that feeling."
As for
her off-screen love scenes, Gellar says she's doing her share of dating but isn't about to
settle down. "People say, 'Why aren't you in
a serious relationship?'" she scoffs. "Hey, I'm 21 years old. This is my time to have fun." She's notoriously tight-lipped about
the identity of her mystery dates (she's been seen at premieres with...) explaining that
she learned from watching the stars that came before her, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Sandra
Bullock, whom she calls her role model, that it's better not to kiss and tell in
Hollywood. Though she claims she's not much of
a schemer when it comes to romance, Gellar has been known to create a little mystery by
telling her would-be suitor that the flowers on her table are from "a friend"
when they're actually from her agent. And she will admit to getting
romantic with fellow actors though she says it's not her ideal situation. "I have a tendency to gravitate
toward people that aren't in the business," she says, "and it's hard now because
I don't really meet that many people that aren't in the business."
She
did meet a new gym buddy recently, though: Shaquille O'Neill. "He's my workout
boyfriend," she says proudly. "He spots me every once in a
while." And what words of encouragement does
the basketball superstar offer when Buffy's pumping iron, Go for the burn? Pump it up? "He says, 'That's it?'"
Gellar says then bursts into laughter.
Shaq
would be smart to stay in good with Gellar, for she's fiercely loyal to her pals. She's had the same best friends,
Ashley and Brittany, since she was in elementary school and believes that she's most
herself when she's around them. "One of my best friends and I
drove down to the set of Angel last night to surprise David," she says
referring to the Buffy spin-off series starring her former love interest, David
Boreanz. "When I'm with my friends,
we're like teenagers, just really giddy and silly. Well, the executive producer of Buffy
was there and he said, 'I've never seen you like this. It is so endearing'."
Seth
Green, who plays Oz on Buffy, says he's seen plenty of Gellar's endearing side. When the two went to the premiere of
Spiceworld as part of a group, Green had just split from his long-time
girlfriend. "I showed up at Sarah's
place," he recalls, "and she said, 'Where's your girlfriend?' and I said, 'I
don't know.' Sarah didn't say anything, didn't
ask anything, she just knew and she took my hand and said, 'Well, I'll be your date
tonight,' and literally didn't leave my side the entire night." Asked what she remembers most about
the evening, Gellar leans forward in her chair and whispers, "Ginger Spice literally felt
Seth up."
Though
watching Ginger Spice cop a feel off her friend wasn't the social highlight of Sarah's
year, it might have been close. "If anything I've become more
of a homebody lately," admits Gellar. She's not alone, for it seems that
many of her peers, like Jennifer Love Hewitt and Melissa Joan Hart, are also squeaky clean
show biz veterans who have worked their entire life to get where they are, and are not
about to jeopardize it with some Shannen Doherty-style bad behavior. "I think Hollywood's giving the
success to the people that can handle it," figures Gellar, who missed the New York
premier of Cruel Intentions because she was needed at Buffy.
"There's a lot of sacrifice, and hard work comes with it."
Still,
the woman who bounces of the walls every week on Buffy leaving dead demons in her
wake must be itching to cut loose. "Actually, I was supposed to go
to the Hole-Marilyn Manson concert tonight with the girls from Buffy," she
teases, "but I have an early call tomorrow and some big meetings after work so I'm
going to go home and go to sleep."
Well,
there's always Australia.
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