Shaken by the death of her sitcom co-star Robin Williams, the actor put her career on hold for the best part of a decade. Now she’s back battling supernatural beings in Wolf Pack – but will she ever revive the Slayer?
hen Sarah Michelle Gellar was sent the script for a new supernatural teen drama, her first instinct was to let the dead lie. “I was like, ‘I’m not reading it,’” she says firmly. “Werewolves? No, thank you – been there, done that.”
Now, however, Gellar is getting back to work. Last year she had a small but well-received part in Netflix’s teen comedy Do Revenge, her first film role since 2009 and a homage to her part in 1999’s Cruel Intentions; today she is in the new Paramount+ series Wolf Pack, playing an arson investigator on the trail of supernatural forces.Does it feel as if she’s making a comeback, I ask her. “It does,” she says, her face lighting up. “It’s such an interesting time for me.
What won her over to Wolf Pack was the script, she says, by Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis. “Jeff wasn’t just looking for ‘SMG’ to be part of a werewolf show,” she says. “He was looking to modernise the tale, and deal with what we’re all facing now.”On top of werewolves, the show’s teenage characters struggle with social media, anxiety and the threat of California wildfires: issues that strike close to home for Gellar .
For all its similarities to Buffy, Wolf Pack has one key difference: this time Gellar is in a position of influence, as an executive producer as well as the lead. She moved to the west coast aged 16, weeks after graduating from a New York high school for child actors. At 17, she shot the pilot for Buffy. “I was young,” she says. “I remember, in the first season, people would go to a bar after work, and I was years away from going to a bar – which did also help with my being able to just focus on the amount of work.”Gellar has often spoken of the pressure she was under to carry the series, working all week with no outside life. Today she shrugs it off.
It is not just audiences that have been hostile to women, but sets. In recent years, Buffy The Vampire Slayer has attracted controversy, with showrunner Joss Whedon accused of misogynistic behaviour behind the scenes. From her position of power on Wolf Pack’s set, Gellar was able “to set up an infrastructure for the younger cast”, she says. “Something that I know for sure that I didn’t have on any of my jobs.”“Somebody that was there to listen. There are things in place in the business now – there was no such thing as an intimacy coordinator when I was there – but also, you don’t know that person.
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