Sarah Michelle Gellar didn’t return to supernatural television for the money or the prestige. She returned for the same reason she fell in love with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the first place: the monsters.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Gellar explained what drew her to Wolf Pack — Paramount+’s werewolf drama from Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis. “One of my favorite things about Buffy was the utilization of the monsters being metaphors for the horrors of high school, of adolescence,” she said. Wolf Pack does something similar, except the metaphors have grown up with its audience. Instead of the terrors of seventh grade, it uses its supernatural elements to explore the anxieties of modern life — the isolation of the pandemic, the stress of a world that has become increasingly difficult to navigate.
Gellar drew a direct line between the two shows: “Instead of using the monsters for adolescents, we were using the monsters for the modern-day pains that we have, which is the anxiety of life and how stressful life has really become for everybody, at every age.”
She was also disarmingly honest about the specific pain she was drawing on. “I’ve said to my daughter the other day, ‘Seventh grade sucks, it just really does,'” she admitted. “I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve had a lot of bad in my life. I’ve lost a lot of people. I still think the worst year of my life is probably seventh grade.” That’s the kind of vulnerability that made Buffy resonate — and it sounds like she’s reaching for it again.
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