Sarah Michelle Gellar has spent a significant chunk of her career being scared — or more accurately, doing the scaring. Between Buffy, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Grudge, and now Wolf Pack on Paramount+, she has built one of the more impressive horror CVs in Hollywood. So when she talks about what actually frightens her, it’s worth paying attention.
In interviews around the Wolf Pack premiere this week, Gellar has been pretty open about the fact that real fear is less about monsters and more about the human stuff underneath. Teenagers, as she’s pointed out more than once, are genuinely terrifying — not because of anything supernatural, but because of the chaos and intensity that comes with that stage of life. Wolf Pack leans into that. The werewolf mythology is the frame, but what the show is really about is two kids who survive a wildfire together and come out of it fundamentally changed, bound together in ways they don’t fully understand. That kind of emotional vulnerability? Scarier than any creature.
Gellar plays Kristin Ramsey, an arson investigator who suspects one of the students started the fire. It’s a different kind of role for her — she’s not the one doing the hunting this time, but she’s not exactly a straightforward good guy either, which is what drew her to it.
But inevitably, the conversation keeps circling back to Buffy. And to be fair to Gellar, she hasn’t been dodging it. She’s been remarkably candid throughout this press tour about what it was actually like to work on that show — describing it as an “extremely toxic male set” where women were deliberately kept at odds with each other. The idea, as she’s explained it, was that if the women got too close, became too united, they’d become too powerful — so the environment was engineered to prevent that.
What’s striking is how clearly she can now see what was being done, and how long it took to realise it wasn’t normal. She’s talked about genuinely believing for years that this was just how sets worked — that the friction and the pitting of people against each other was standard industry behaviour. It took working on projects with healthier environments to understand it wasn’t.
Wolf Pack is, in some ways, the corrective. She’s producing it as well as starring in it, which gives her a level of control and input she didn’t have on Buffy. The set has been described as a genuinely collaborative environment — which, given the contrast, probably means more to her than it would to most.
She’s said repeatedly that she remains proud of Buffy — proud of what the cast built together, proud of what the character meant to people, proud of her own work. The toxicity was real and it was harmful, but it doesn’t erase what the show was. Both things can be true. That’s a pretty mature place to land after everything.
Wolf Pack is streaming now on Paramount+.
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