She says Sarah Michelle Gellar reflects on her career and doesn’t regret turning down enormous movie roles for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
As she returns to TV, playing an arson specialist who knows more than she lets on in the Paramount+ series Wolf Pack, it’s a great point for fans of the veteran actor.
There’s been continued discussion about the fact that Gellar is an immensely talented entertainer who never got her deserved recognition in terms of prizes and big movies, even though she performed as one of the most enduring TV characters of all time.
In The Guardian As part of an interview with the Buffy star in The Guardian, it’s noted that Gellar turned down major movie roles because of her duties as the leader of a television series.
She turned down roles in David Fincher’s Fight Club, Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, and the romantic comedy The Wedding Planner. At the same time, Martin Scorsese considered her for Jenny Everdeane in Gangs of New York, a role that eventually went to Cameron Diaz.
Still, in the quote below, she talks about why she doesn’t stay on what might have been:
Turned-Down Roles of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Proof Of Her Excellence
Fans of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer are well acquainted with what Gellar can do when she’s compared with the right script. Her best presentation, in the eyes of many, happens in the Buffy season 5 episode “The Body,” which sees the superhuman slayer reeling from the premature and all-too-human death of her mother.
Gellar had earned a standing at the time for being one of the best on-screen criers in Hollywood, conveying much with as little as a lip twitching or a slight shift of tone.
She was also very comical and perfectly relatable and challenging without ever falling into the trope of just being a blank action hero.
Her versatility can also be seen in I Understand What You Did Last Summer, in which Gellar creates a compelling case that she should have been the last girl or Cruel Intentions as the irresistibly pleasurable villain.
Looking at the actor’s presence in the film, filled with quiet, scary movies & serene romcoms, there have always been queries about why Gellar didn’t jump to movie renown even as she was one of the most popular entertainers of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
There are at least a few clear causes why it didn’t happen. One is that, back in that era, there was a much stronger separation between movie and TV actors, & there was a bias against those who operated in teen dramas that had those shows from obtaining nominated at the Emmys and raising their artistic cachet.
Another reason is that Gellar was preoccupied with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the long hours of filming didn’t leave much room for other high-profile ventures. Still, the fact that she was considered by prominent directors like Fincher, Mendes, and Scorsese proves that her work as the Chosen One was not overlooked. Hopefully, Wolf Pack is just the first stop in a larger comeback, as she has intimated.
