In the year 2000, Sarah Michelle Gellar appeared in an episode of Sex and the City. She played herself. This is, on reflection, exactly the sort of thing that happens when you are simultaneously one of the most recognisable faces on American television and a show like Sex and the City is in its third season and collecting cameos the way other people collect stamps.
The episode is “Escape from New York,” and Gellar’s appearance amounts to a brief, very funny exchange with the main cast at a party. She is poised, slightly arch, and exits the scene as cleanly as she entered it. It is precisely as good as a two-minute cameo by a guest playing herself can possibly be.
What is more interesting is that Gellar has indicated, in a recent interview, that she would happily return to the franchise — now running as And Just Like That on HBO Max — if asked. “I loved doing it,” she said. “It was a show I watched. I was a fan.”
The And Just Like That casting team should be paying attention. Gellar at 45 is considerably more interesting television than Gellar at 23, and not because anything has diminished — quite the opposite. She has spent the intervening decades doing things other former television stars have not: a long marriage, two children, a genuine pivot into food entrepreneurship with Foodstirs, and a recent return to acting in Wolf Pack that suggested she has found a way to channel something she could not fully access in her twenties.
The original Sex and the City was, at its best, a show about how women occupy space in a city that was not built with them in mind — professionally, romantically, physically. Gellar playing herself in that context, even briefly, was a small joke about celebrity and the strangeness of fame. A return appearance, twenty-three years on, would have the opportunity to be something more interesting than a joke.
Whether the And Just Like That writers would know what to do with her is a separate question. One lives in hope.
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