Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr have been married for twenty-two years. In the current entertainment landscape, this qualifies as approximately miraculous, and various interviewers have been attempting to extract the secret ever since the marriage became too long to ignore.
In a recent interview with Fox News Digital, Gellar offered an answer that is simultaneously obvious and increasingly rare: work. “I think everything takes work in you,” she said, “whether it’s a friendship or a work relationship or a marriage. You have to put the work in.” She added something that caught attention: “We live in an extremely disposable society now. Your phone breaks, you don’t fix it. You get a new one. I think that’s a lot of the attitude toward relationships.”
It is the kind of thing that sounds simple until you sit with it for a moment.
The pair met on the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer in the late 1990s, married in 2002, and have two children — Charlotte, now sixteen, and Rocky, thirteen. Prinze Jr has spoken previously about the mechanics of the thing: cooking, laughter, a compulsive need to do the washing up whilst dinner is still on the hob. He has described these not as romantic gestures but as habits — the texture of a shared life, not its highlight reel.
Gellar is currently playing Tanya Martin in Dexter: Original Sin, the prequel series for Paramount+. It is, by most accounts, a significant return to television after several years of more selective work. Prinze Jr has been raising the children and, when the mood takes him, discussing professional wrestling on the internet with a level of enthusiasm that tends to charm people who encounter it.
They have arrived, in other words, at something that looks from the outside like a genuinely functional arrangement. Which is not nothing, in an industry built substantially around the dramatic collapse of arrangements.
Buffy fans will recall that Gellar’s character spent seven seasons navigating relationships that were, to put it gently, not smooth. Angel left. Riley left. Spike was complicated in ways that took the better part of three seasons to fully articulate. There is something pleasant about the fact that the actress spent her twenties playing someone for whom love was almost exclusively catastrophic, whilst building something rather more stable in the other direction.
Twenty-two years. They put the work in.
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