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Sarah Michelle Gellar returns to acting after ten years

by Ruel J. Mendoza /

02.01.23
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Photos: @sarahmgellar

What won Sarah Michelle Gellar over to Wolf Pack was the script by Teen Wolf and Criminal Minds creator Jeff Davis. Jeff wasn’t just looking for ‘SMG’ to be part of a werewolf show. He was looking to modernize the tale, and deal with what we’re all facing now, our monsters. The scary part is the manifestation of the mental health crisis we’re facing, the isolation and then, on a lesser note, what we’re doing to our planet.”

After 10 years, Buffy The Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar returns to television with a starring role in the Paramount+ supernatural series Wolf Pack that aired last January 26.

The 45-year old actress was last seen on the comedy series The Crazy Ones that starred the late Robin Williams, in 2013.

The actress revealed that the sudden death of Williams changed the way she looked at her life and decided to take a break from acting to spend more time with her family.

Gellar told PEOPLE: “I’ve been working my entire life. When I had kids — and it was right after Robin passed away — there was just so much going on in my life and I just said, ‘I need to take a break.' I need to be here for these early formative years of my kids’ life. I needed that break to be the parent that I wanted to be.”

Gellar has two children with actor-husband Freddie Prinze Jr.: Charlotte Grace (12) and Rocky James (9). Now that her kids are older, Gellar found the right opportunity to return to acting with Wolf Pack.

The actress remembers the first time she was sent the script of a new supernatural teen drama: “I was like, ‘I’m not reading it. Werewolves? No, thank you – been there, done that.”

It has been 20 years since her iconic show Buffy The Vampire Slayer ended and Gellar was not about to do another Buffy Summers character.

“It’s really hard when you’ve done something like ‘Buffy. Because it’s not that I’ve avoided genre, it’s just that I can’t top that. So it has to be either something that’s so different or equally good as Buffy, or all of those things have to sort of come together. I love genre, but it has to fit," she said in Variety.

Gellar recently made headlines for saying she would not want to reprise Buffy in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot: “I am very proud of the show that we created and it doesn’t need to be done. We wrapped that up. I am all for them continuing the story, because there’s the story of female empowerment. I love the way the show was left: ‘Every girl who has the power can have the power.’ It’s set up perfectly for someone else to have the power. But like I said, the metaphors of ‘Buffy’ were the horrors of adolescence. I think I look young, but I am not an adolescent.”

But Gellar browsed through the script she initially rejected and she found it interesting. She got onboard, not just an actor but the show's executive producer as well.

"Supernatural and thriller projects still offer the most exciting roles for women: You get to be vulnerable, and you get to fight. But when you have a show like Buffy it's very hard because inevitably you're going to face comparisons. This show was really the first time someone came to me again using the monsters as metaphors for what we face now: anxiety, loneliness, and the idea of finding your pack.

"It's definitely a slow build. I liken it to The Sixth Sense, how you have to watch the whole movie, get to the end, and then go back and realize, 'Oh, I didn't see this, this and this.' There's bread crumbs throughout the beginning episodes where you might see less of me, and you have to sort of put it together to really understand why I'm there."

Wolf Pack is based on the book series by Edo Van Belkom and follows a teenage boy (Armani Jackson) and a teenage girl (Bella Shepard) whose lives are forever changed when a California wildfire awakens a terrifying supernatural creature.

Gellar will play arson Investigator Kristin Ramsey, a highly regarded expert in her field and no stranger to personal loss, brought in by authorities to catch the teenage arsonist who started a massive wildfire which may have also led to the reawakening of a supernatural predator terrorizing Los Angeles.

What won her over to Wolf Pack was the script by Teen Wolf and Criminal Minds creator Jeff Davis.

“Jeff wasn’t just looking for ‘SMG’ to be part of a werewolf show. He was looking to modernize the tale, and deal with what we’re all facing now, our monsters. The scary part is the manifestation of the mental health crisis we’re facing, the isolation and then, on a lesser note, what we’re doing to our planet.”

Born in Long Island, New York, Gellar was the only child of a nursery school teacher and a garment worker. Gellar has been acting since she was five. In 1981, she made her small-screen debut in a Burger King advertisement.

When Gellar was seven, her parents divorced. Raised in Manhattan by her mother, she attended a private school—on a partial scholarship—where she was bullied for her lesser privilege. A self-described “nerd”, she continued to earn good grades even as acting took over her life.

Gellar made her debut in the soap opera All My Children in 1993, playing Kendall Hart, the long-lost teenage daughter of character Erica Kane (Susan Lucci). As she got the role, Gellar was complimented as having the acting talent and the "forceful personality" needed to go up against Lucci's experience.

In 1995, at the age of eighteen, she won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series for All My Children. The same year, Gellar left the show to pursue other acting opportunities

She moved to the west coast in 1996 after graduating from a New York high school for child actors. She auditioned many times and was given the title role in Buffy The Vampire Slayer that premiered in 1997. It ran for seven seasons with 144 episodes.

Gellar recalled: “I was young. 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 also appeared in two slasher films (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2), a dark teen comedy (Cruel Intentions), two Scooby Doo films, a horror film (The Grudge) and a romantic comedy (Simply Irresistable). She eventually turned down roles in the films Fight Club, Gangs of New York, The Wedding Planner, and American Beauty.

Last year Gellar had a small but well-received part in Netflix’s teen comedy Do Revenge, her first film role since 2009.

"I started thinking about returning to work when the pandemic struck. Since then, it's been about waiting for the right thing. It’s such an interesting time for me. It was my first step back – to make sure that this is really what I want, and that my family can handle it. The next step was to do something in the other genre that has been so good to me."