There’s a really good interview with Sarah Michelle Gellar in the Guardian today, and if you haven’t read it yet I’d strongly recommend going and doing that before you finish reading this. It covers a lot of ground — her childhood, the Buffy years, the career break, Robin Williams, Wolf Pack — and it’s one of the more honest and unhurried conversations she’s given in a while.
The headline quote is about the Buffy demons looking a bit dated now that CGI has moved on so much, which is fair, but the more interesting stuff is about why she stepped away from all of it in the first place.
The short version: Robin Williams. Gellar co-starred with him on the CBS sitcom The Crazy Ones back in 2013-2014, and his death in 2014 hit her hard. She describes it as a “reset” moment — suddenly everything felt like it was moving too fast, and she had a very young son at home (he was two months old when they filmed the pilot), and she just needed to stop. She knew taking a break was risky. She knew she could be forgotten, surpassed, lose her footing. She did it anyway.
What followed was the best part of a decade out of the spotlight — raising her kids with Freddie Prinze Jr, staying off sets, mostly off press. The Guardian piece paints a picture of someone who genuinely needed that time, not someone who was just waiting for the right script.
The way back started carefully. Last year she had a small role in Netflix’s Do Revenge, which she describes as a deliberate “first step” — partly to test whether she still loved it, partly to see whether her family could handle the shift back to working mum. Charlotte came along on set. It worked. And so now there’s Wolf Pack.
What’s clear from the interview is that Wolf Pack isn’t just another job — it’s the first time she’s had real power on a production. She’s executive producer as well as lead, and she made very clear to creator Jeff Davis from the start that she intended to actually use that title. She says she told him directly: she has 40 years of experience, she has ideas, she’s going to be vocal. If he just wanted a famous name on the poster, she wasn’t the right person.
That matters a lot given everything that’s come out about the Buffy set over the past few years. She still won’t go into specifics about Joss Whedon — she says it doesn’t help anything for her to relitigate it — but she’s clearly channelled a lot of what she experienced into building something better for the younger Wolf Pack cast. She talks about making sure there are people the cast can come to, that there’s an infrastructure, that no one is left without support the way she was.
There are some other great bits in there too — she turned down roles in Fight Club, American Beauty, Gangs of New York and The Wedding Planner because Buffy scheduling wouldn’t allow it, and she still gets frustrated at not being taken seriously by men on set, though she says at least now she can call it out in a way she couldn’t a decade ago.
On a Buffy revival: she’s not interested in coming back, even in a cameo. She thinks the character and the world belong to the fans now, and a return would just invite comparisons that would undermine whoever takes it forward next. She loves the ending — loves that the whole final act is about sharing the power, giving every girl who wants it the ability to be the Slayer. She thinks that’s the point of the whole thing, really.
It’s a good interview. Go read it.
Wolf Pack is streaming now on Paramount+.
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