Sarah Michelle Gellar ruled the '90s as Buffy Summers, teen vampire slayer, but the decades
since have been more quiet ones for her. Here's why you rarely hear about Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Gellar in the title role, ran for seven seasons from 1997 to
2003. It laid the foundation for the spinoff show Angel, plus a pile of comic books, video games,
action figures, and plenty of other Buffy-related media and memorabilia. Needless to say, it's an
extremely popular and influential show. While it's not impossible for an actor to strike gold
twice and play the main character on multiple monster-hit series, it's certainly improbable.
Gellar did get more high profile post-Buffy jobs than most of her castmates, with some
notable exceptions. David Boreanaz and Alyson Hannigan both remained major
television stars on Bones, which ran from 2005 to 2017, and How I Met Your Mother,
airing from 2005 to 2014, respectively. Both shows also lasted longer than Buffy,
but it would be a stretch to suggest either left a cultural footprint as enduring.
Hopefully the studios involved compensated Gellar proportionately and fairly for her
work on Buffy — as well as for her contributions to films like 1997's
I Know What You Did Last Summer and 2002's Scooby-Doo. If that assumption is accurate,
she became a millionaire several times over well before she turned 30.
Gellar's husband and fellow '90s heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr. also achieved an impressive
degree of film and television stardom in his 20s, in productions like She's All That and Friends.
So it feels reasonable to guess that he also became the average person's
idea of very wealthy relatively early in his life. The couple has bills to pay,
just like anyone else — but they're probably not going to be desperate for a cash influx
anytime soon. That means they don't have to take every role or job they're offered,
which means they simply aren't on television as much as they'd need to be if they were broke.
Pop culture went to a strange place in the late '90s. In music,
the decade started with Nirvana and somehow ended with the all-singing,
all-dancing Backstreet Boys releasing the top-selling album of 1999. Meanwhile,
film enjoyed a much more consistent 10 years. But if there was a strange trend in cinema and
television during the 90s, it was media that fell within the vaguely-defined "teen" genre.
While Buffy transcends the '90s teen explosion, the same can't be said of I Know What You Did
Last Summer or Cruel Intentions, two significant works of the era and genre,
both prominently featuring Gellar. She wasn't exactly typecast, but her persona became very
closely tied to a distinct point in time and a distinct entertainment demographic.
Trends go out of style and become retro-cool again in cycles. But casting Gellar in a 2020 film or
TV show might be kind of like commissioning Dave Grohl to make a SoundCloud rap album:
You know he can do it, and he might even do an exceptional job, but it just feels ... strange.
Gellar looked like she was on her way back to the top of the television heap as recently as 2013.
On paper, the small screen return of Robin Williams looked like a no-fail situation.
Thus launched CBS' The Crazy Ones,
on which Gellar played the daughter of Williams' eccentric advertising executive.
"I think that's the thing that people don't realize, you think he's this crazy funny
Mrs. Doubtfire Aladdin genie and he's just the kindest most gentle man."
Alas, the show only completed its first 22-episode season before the network pulled the plug.
Cancellation after only one season isn't a meaningful indicator of a television show's
quality. And on the flipside, bad shows sometimes stay on TV for years. The Crazy Ones was also
doomed by outside circumstance — Williams passed away in 2014, a few months after the
final episode of The Crazy Ones aired. So even if the first season had been a bigger success,
a second season might've been impossible without a significant recasting, or possibly a
reconfiguration of the entire show. Nevertheless, The Crazy Ones didn't become a lasting hit.
Gellar has a number of projects percolating at various stages of
development. One particular production is of unique interest to a base of hardcore fans.
Here's a hint — it's the project based on a cartoon in which the character
Gellar portrays fights a skeleton bad guy, voiced by the one and only Mark Hamill.
Announced in 2019, Netflix's animated Masters of the Universe: Revelation
features Gellar lending her voice alongside a star-studded cast. This isn't the only modern
Masters of the Universe project, but it's a whole lot less murky than the much-delayed movie.
This isn't Gellar's first time working as a voice actor — she also appeared as April in 2007's TMNT,
and has popped up frequently on Star Wars: Rebels and Robot Chicken.
Oddly enough, she did not provide the voice of Buffy Summers in the
unaired pilot of 2004's Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Animated Series.
If you're the sort of person who can't be bothered with the media unless it's related to superheroes,
space aliens, or some variety of supernatural forces, then it's understandable if you think
Gellar fell off the face of the planet after Buffy ended in 2003.
If you don't tune in to daytime talk shows or read celebrity gossip magazines,
you might have thought she's been missing all these years.
Gellar is still famous enough for Daily Mail photographers to follow her around while she
does normal stuff like go grocery shopping and pick up the mail. Meanwhile, the folks at People
magazine think Gellar and Prinze adopting puppies is a newsworthy event — which, granted, it is,
but mostly because every puppy is newsworthy. As recently as October of 2020, Gellar went on
The Kelly Clarkson Show and announced that her children are finally old enough to watch Buffy,
and they've binged the heck out of it to help make the best of the COVID-19 lockdown. She explained,
"I didn't know if they'd be into it, but they are so into it.
Except I'm the world's biggest disappointment for them, because they'll always ask questions,
and I'll be like, 'I don't remember! I'll have to text someone and ask.'"
"They think they know it better than I do at this point."
To be fair, who really remembers what happened at their jobs 20 years ago?
"My son actually thinks that I'm cool now."
Cookies, brownies, cakes, donuts — a lot of the time, they're loaded with excess sugar,
salt, and chemicals we can't pronounce. The problem is,
they're also delicious. A few years back, Gellar ran up against this age-old conundrum,
and decided to do something about it. In a 2019 interview, she told AOL,
"Our kids were really interested in baking [...] and my knowledge of baking [was] all eating,
and I don't have the time to get 30 million ingredients.
So I went to the store, and we were shocked that in 2015 [...] the only things were
the traditional legacy boxed brands [...] where the number one ingredient was salt."
The lack of baking mix that wasn't aggressively terrible for human health prompted Gellar to
co-found what she and her business associates call the "junk-free baking" company, Foodstirs.
And if the photos on the boxes are any indication, Foodstirs makes some delicious treats.
"We just started really baking together and having these really fun moments,
and there's nothing a kid loves more than dough and rolling it and making a mess in the kitchen."
Foodstirs is also unique as a professional
endeavor Gellar's undergone that has nothing to do with Buffy, or movies,
or anything which we as the content-consuming public would normally associate with her.
As it turns out, people do have lives outside of their television personas.
Gellar is a deeply committed mom, like so many mothers around the world. But the key difference
here is that typical moms only end up in the news if they do something horrible or amazing.
Gellar parents just as hard as anyone, while also being the
kind of famous person who is photographed when she runs out to the store for milk.
Raising little ones takes up a whole lot of time and attention. Since Gellar and Prinze officially
became parents in 2009, child rearing has likely eaten into time both of them could have otherwise
devoted to acting in R-rated films, screaming cuss words, and loudly joking about adult
topics around the house. Granted, most of those things don't seem to be of interest to the pair,
but it's definitely clear that their kids take up a major amount of space in their lives.
In recent years, Gellar has cultivated a mutually-beneficial relationship
between her media persona and her mom-hood. Most notably, her business venture with Foodstirs
was partially inspired by a family treat-baking activity. She's also indicated taking a hands-on
approach to her son's COVID-mandated Zoom-learning situation in at least two unrelated interviews.
All evidence indicates that Gellar spends loads
of time with her offspring — and that's just the way she likes it.
Gellar does quite a bit of partnering with specific brands, like many celebrities. Thus,
it would be inaccurate to describe her work in optical health as "charity." However,
even if she is advertising products, she goes about it in a way that encourages people to
make sure their eyes are in tip-top shape. And hey, it's much better to be a spokesperson for
vision than cigarettes or cheap vodka. According to the Daily Mail, Gellar was
on an Australian trip to promote an optical retail chain when she told a crowd of fans,
"I was working on Buffy and getting horrible headaches and squinting.The
doctor on set told me to get my eyes checked. [...] I had no health
insurance [...] so I had never had my eyes checked. He told me I was blind as a bat!"
More recently, Gellar's re-centered her optical-related endeavors on childhood myopia.
Apparently, fixating on screens all day is pretty unhealthy for
developing eyeballs — who would have guessed?
A quick image search will call up plenty of visual evidence of Gellar appearing at
fundraising functions for various causes. But she's definitely invested a uniquely
large amount of time into UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital. Gellar hosted an
outdoor benefit for the facility back in 2015, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, she had
been routinely volunteering at the hospital around that time. She told the publication,
"It's hard enough to get children to go to the doctor to get a shot.
Think about what sick children go through day in and day out. What Mattel provides is truly
amazing, from the smallest details — like little kids don't use wheelchairs; they use red wagons;
the window washers dress up as superheroes. What they do requires a lot of funding."
While the sight of fantasy characters might be helpful for sick children,
it might not be the best strategy for adults. Seeing a character from A Nightmare on Elm
Street outside your window while recovering from surgery doesn't exactly seem conducive to healing.
In an age when Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman remain contentious topics in certain circles,
it should come as no surprise that female action heroes were something of a rarity two decades ago.
Back in the late '90s, Buffy Summers joined the ranks of Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley and,
well, not exactly a ton of other butt-kicking female characters on screen.
At the time, Buffy was properly recognized as a milestone of feminism and LGBTQ representation
in sci-fi and fantasy media. But in retrospect, it's notable that Joss
Whedon went on to direct two of the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time,
while every other famous person associated with Buffy remained, primarily, on television.
It's also worth noting that dashing ladies' man David Boreanaz went on to
star on multiple shows after Buffy, whereas neither Gellar's Ringer nor The Crazy Ones
got picked up for second seasons. As talented, lucky, hard-working,
and well-represented as Boreanaz and Whedon probably are, they also benefit from the kind
of society-wide sexism that banished Winona Ryder to prestige television,
while keeping Johnny Depp top-billed in major blockbusters long after the end of the '90s.
Gellar is still very much around, but you have to wonder what she
might have done in the past couple of decades in a more fair world.
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