Sarah Michelle Gellar makes her first major post-Buffy appearance in 'The Grudge.' Genre movies provide the best roles for women, she tells self-confessed Buffy geek Anna Carey.
In a Knightsbridge hotel room on a rainy Wednesday morning, Sarah Michelle Gellar is confronting a dangerous new enemy. Is it a vampire? A hell god? A freaky Japanese ghost? No, it's a super-grande cup of Starbucks coffee. The cardboard coffee cup is huge and over-filled. Gellar is wearing a cream off-the-shoulder jumper and cream trousers. This could get very ugly. Especially as Gellar freely admits that she's kind of messy.
"I'm such a disaster," she says, gingerly approaching the brimming cup. "You can always tell what I've had for dinner."
But she skilfully, if inelegantly, avoids serious spillage by crouching by the table, her face at cup level, and barely tipping the cup. It may be awkward, but her spotless cream outfit is saved. Evil has been averted once more.
Sarah Michelle Gellar is in London to promote The Grudge, her spectacularly scary new movie. The story of an American exchange student in Tokyo - played by Gellar - who becomes the victim of a vengeful ghost, The Grudge is a remake of a Japanese cult hit. Making it allowed Gellar to finally visit a country that had fascinated her for years.
"I nearly had a panic attack in the airplane because I'd really built Japan up in my head and I was sure it was going to disappoint me." It didn't. "It's like stepping into the future and the past all at once," she says, laughing. "I mean, I live in America - we have no history! Our buildings were built, like, seven years ago. But in Japan you have skyscrapers that are like something out of Blade Runner and then right beside them are temples that have been there for 400 years. It's an amazing city. I think some of my friends thought I wasn't actually shooting a movie at all because I visited every single touristy thing there."
But it wasn't all fun. The Grudge was the first time a Japanese film has been remade using the original director and a Japanese crew, none of whom spoke any English. Using the original crew was good for the film as a whole, but rather difficult for its star, whose knowledge of Japanese had previously been limited to a few basic phrases and the correct names for her favourite types of sushi. Gellar, however, rose to the occasion.
"It was a really interesting education in communication," she says. "I discovered that you can make friends and form emotional connections without speaking the same language. Your friendships are based on so much more than small talk - it's not all 'so, where did you go to school? Did you see this movie?' It's about eye contact and reading people's expressions."
As well as offering a quick class in international relationships, the movie also represented Gellar's new-found freedom, after seven years of working to a rigid TV schedule. While working on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, her only free time was for a few months each summer, between the end of one series and the beginning of the next. "When I finished [Buffy] and my obligations to the Scooby Doo movies, it was the first time in my adult life when I could make my own decisions," she says, taking another sip. "I could make a film because I was passionate about it, not just because it would fit in with my three-month hiatus from the show. So I decided I'd just sit back and wait until I felt really strongly about a project."
She felt that passion as soon as she heard that The Grudge was being remade. "I had seen the original movie without any subtitles, and it scared the living daylights out of me, which is amazing considering I couldn't understand a word of it," she says. "And when I heard they were doing a remake, and that Sam Raimi was producing and the original director was doing it, I went all out to get it. I went and auditioned and apparently what got me the part was my passion for it."
She may be all fired up about The Grudge, but it'll be a while yet before one can write about Gellar without Buffy Summers rearing her perfectly groomed head. Until last summer, Gellar played the title role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the supernatural TV drama series based on the lacklustre 1992 movie of the same name. To the surprise of everyone who'd seen the original, Buffy turned out to be a delicious blend of thrills, whipsmart comedy and complex teenage angst. By the time it ended after seven seasons, it was the subject of several academic symposia, many gushing tributes in broadsheet newspapers and countless fan websites. It had also made Buffy - and, by extension, Gellar - a pop culture icon.
So, for a longtime Buffy geek, shaking hands with the Slayer herself is an indescribably weird experience. I've never been fazed by interviewing celebrities before, but this time, while I'm politely asking what I hope are sensible questions, my mind is just going "oh my God, oh my God, I'm talking to Buffy!"
Gellar is aware that as far as most people are concerned - and not just people like me who actually own a deck of Buffy Top Trumps cards - she's still the vampire slayer. And she knows that she ran the risk of being characterised as a horror genre actor when she chose The Grudge as her first major post-Buffy role. But she argues that for an actress, genre films offer the meatiest parts.
"I want to play strong female characters. I have to be part of the story - I can't be the wife, I can't be the girlfriend," she says. "And genre movies are the only ones where women can have these big roles. Look at the past two Best Actress Oscar winners - both their first roles after the Oscars were genre movies. Halle Berry did Gothika and Charlize Theron's doing Aeon Flux."
Gellar warms to her theme. "And it's not just them - Julianne Moore's biggest movie in years is The Forgotten. You start to realise that these are the roles where women really get to shine. And I think they prove that audiences do want to see women in leading roles, so maybe these are all small strides towards a time when women can take the lead in a wider variety of movies." But while she had no reservations about returning to the supernatural, Gellar doesn't want to play another girl who can magically beat up the bad guys. "Buffy was such an amazing character, and I promised myself that if I stepped away from it, I wouldn't ever try to recreate it," she says. "If I was going to play [another ass-kicking superheroine] I should have just stayed where I was, because nothing's going to be better than Buffy. No one's going to out-Buffy Buffy!"
27-year-old Gellar has been flying high for more than 20 years now. Buffy may have propelled her to international fame, but it wasn't her first starring role - she started her acting career at the age of four when she appeared in a Burger King ad. She went on to become a successful theatre actor in her native New York, before landing a plum role in the popular US soap opera All My Children, for which she won a Daytime Emmy. Having been in the spotlight for so long, there was a time when she considered trying something else.
"When I was in high school and it was almost time to apply to college, that's when I had to make a decision - was this what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life? Because if I went to college, I would have to give it 100 per cent," she says. "I graduated high school a year early, because I had a lot of advanced classes, and I worked at All My Children for another year after that. But then, when I was 17, I really had to choose what I wanted to do. And I decided that I would move to LA and if I didn't get a good job in a year, then I'd go back to school. And when I was 18, I got Buffy."
She never regretted choosing acting over college. "I love what I do, and I'm really lucky that I'm reasonably successful at it." And she reckons that if she ever decides to do something different, she won't be the only actor to branch out. "Hey, look at Brad Pitt!" shelaughs. "He's becoming an architect, and he's still making movies. That's the luxury of doing films as opposed to television - you can make two great films a year and still have a lot of time to do other stuff."
Having proved herself to be a fine comic actress in Buffy, Gellar says that she'd love to do some comedy on the big screen - but she says that, again, Buffy has given her high standards. "The humour was so witty, that it'd be hard to find something as good. But I'd love to do a really black esoteric comedy." Her next film - "if the dates work out, and they should" - is Richard Donnie Darko Kelly's new movie, Southland Tales.
"It all takes place over one weekend during an election, and it's kind of a commentary on American tabloid society," says Gellar. "It's pretty hard to describe, but then, can you imagine the pitch for Donnie Darko? 'There's this guy, and his friend is a six-foot-tall bunny who's really mean!' Richard Kelly is a visionary - his ideas are totally out there but he can do justice to them."
Kelly himself has described the movie as a "musical comedy that's 30 per cent comedy, 30 per cent musical, 30 per cent thriller and 10 per cent science fiction", but despite singing and dancing (rather well) in Buffy's magnificent all-musical episode, "Once More, With Feeling", Gellar is adamant that her singing days are over.
"Oh God, I said no to that episode for the longest time. I refused to do it," she says. "And then one day [Buffy creator] Joss [Whedon] just handed me the lyrics sheet." Initially Gellar wanted to lipsync, but finally agreed to do the singing herself.
I tell her that a UCD musical society is apparently planning to put on a stage version of the episode. Her jaw drops. "No way!" she says. "Oh my God, that's awesome. They should tell Joss about that. He'd totally go to see it." She says that she wouldn't rule out working with Whedon again - and yes, maybe even doing a Buffy movie at some stage - but has no plans to go back to doing another TV series full time.
"I go where the great roles are, and I love that you can go so seamlessly from stage to TV to movies. But I couldn't do another weekly one-hour show again right now. I just couldn't put the hours in."
Instead, she's going to try and learn to just chill out for a while. "I was a child actor, so I was always juggling two jobs - there was always school and then there was acting. And then for seven years, I had literally no breaks," she says. "I was either doing Buffy or doing a movie. I actually shot the first Scooby Doo movie simultaneously with Buffy - it was two weeks in Australia, then two weeks in LA, then two weeks in Australia. I was like a crazy person. So now I want to have more of a life."
And for Sarah Michelle Gellar, having a life is easier said than done. "At first, it was like hell," she admits. "I didn't know what to do with myself all day. But then I got into the groove and learned that I have to relax, and I don't have to work just to get out of the house. I can take things easy."
The Grudge is showing in cinemas countrywide