Sarah Michelle Gellar Says She Is ‘So Proud’ of What Buffy Created — Even After a Difficult Few Years

Speaking to SFX magazine ahead of Wolf Pack, Sarah Michelle Gellar has reflected on Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s legacy with characteristic honesty — acknowledging the complications of recent years while making clear that her pride in the work remains intact.

“There have been a tumultuous couple of years for understanding the show,” she said, in an evident reference to the allegations of misconduct against series creator Joss Whedon that have circulated since 2020. “But I think we’re in a place now where we can really appreciate the show for what we created.”

The show’s reach during the pandemic was something Gellar returned to with evident warmth. “I am so proud that during the pandemic, the show reached a whole new generation of people that still felt that it spoke to them, that it was still timely and it still meant something to them.” This is not a small thing: a show that ended in 2003 finding a genuinely new audience twenty years later, not through nostalgia but through relevance.

Gellar was clear-eyed about the show’s imperfections. “There is good and bad to all of it,” she said. Criticism of the show’s lack of racial diversity has grown louder in recent years alongside the reappraisal of its other elements, and she did not wave this away. The honesty is consistent with how she has spoken about the show in general: neither defensively protective nor dismissively apologetic.

On what Buffy represented for the women who watched it, she was direct: “having a character like Buffy, who is so three-dimensional and hits all those notes… you don’t just want to be the wife or the girlfriend.” The show gave a generation of girls a lead character who was chosen, burdened, funny, terrifying, and fully human in ways that television had not consistently managed before.

“As an actor, all you ever want to do is a show that affects people, that they love and holds up,” she said. “That is your legacy. I am so proud of what we created.”

Despite persistent rumours of a revival, Gellar has made clear she has no interest in returning to the role. What she has created is, by her own reckoning and by most objective measures, already enough.