"Okay, I have a burning passion at the moment that I need to talk about. I may have to start a campaign,” declares Sarah Michelle Gellar with the same ferocious intent she brought to driving stakes through the hearts of unruly vampires. I’m not going to protest. I wouldn’t dare.

This is one steely, right-on lady. But what could be eating her? She is, after all, a rather passionate lass, completely dedicated to girl-power and charity (as opposed to charidee) work. And she doesn’t just write the cheques either. She’s worked as a volunteer in the Dominican Republic for Habitat and personally handed out aid packages to families who lost their homes in the recent Californian fires. Heavens, less deserving women have surely been canonised. What’s St. Catherine of Tello done for you lately?
Today, however, sitting in the Mandarin Hotel in London, she has more grievous matters on her mind.
“I want to know what is up with the coffee in English hotels,” says the actress, sternly tapping the Starbucks latte her assistant has just brought her. “I’ve had to stay in London three times this year and the beverages are unbelievably bad. Something needs to be done.”
It could be worse, I suppose. It could be airplane coffee.
“I don’t go to those dark places,” she laughs.
Yeah right, girl. Between I Know What You Did Last Summer, her latest horror film, The Grudge and prowling the streets of Sunnydale at night, she’s made her name by dwelling almost entirely in blackness. Her current status as a ‘dusk ‘til dawn’ global cultural icon, however, was far from being a foregone conclusion.
When Joss Whedon decided to resurrect the high-kicking, tank-topped heroine of his ropey 1992 movie, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, into a television series, few beyond his immediate friends and family can have been trembling with excitement. Who knows what prompted him to translate a one-joke (‘All-American teen kills ghouls in between failing homework assignments’ – yeah, we get it) cinematic flop into a groundbreaking negotiation with neo-feminist agency, teen existentialism and the burdens of embracing adult responsibility, but undoubtedly, some kind of divine spark must have been involved. Suddenly the little girls of the West had a genuine ass-kicking poster girl for female empowerment to aspire to, and not simply because she didn’t run screaming, need rescuing or succumb sensually in the face of a monster mash.
Neither a self-absorbed ‘I want it all, I want it now, I want it wrapped in something pretty’ sort of gal, nor an embittered ‘All men are bastards’ kind of feminist, Buffy was socially responsible, ridding the world of vampires without personal gain. And just to make sure the old patriarchal order got the message, she went sashaying about her business in a skimpy skirt.
W here did Mr. Whedon’s attempt to subvert the normal rules governing gender power and human-vampire relations go so right when Buffy’s celluloid predecessor was so very ludicrous? Well, the casting sure as hell helped. In the 1992 version, it was rather difficult to fear for Kristy Swanson’s safety. One couldn’t help but feel that this vigorous heifer with pom-poms would only have had to run at underworld fiends without her support bra in order to send them flying into the nearest back-alley pile of cardboard boxes.
Her successor, Sarah Michelle Gellar was quite another matter. She invested the role with a rare tenderness and vulnerable Lilliputian dimensions. And gosh, is she ever so tiny in person. No wonder she had to flail so wildly to fill up the screen. When I come galumphing into the room to sit beside her, I feel like a giantess from a distant and much, much bigger planet.
“I know, I know, I’m a very little person and that’s not even the worst of it because I’m wearing my big heels today,” she says stretching out a formidable pair of silver stilettos for inspection. “But I met Kylie Minogue for the first time recently. Now she is much smaller than I am. She was so, so petite that I felt like a float in the Macy’s Parade.”
At this point she starts peeling off the big white woollen poncho that she felt obliged to wear for her previous interview with a lad’s mag. (Hmm, wonder why?) Stripped down to teeny tank top, she now looks even more like a mini-Barbie, or rather a mini-Buffy doll.
“No!” she shrieks with mock horror. “Don’t say that. I hate the Buffy doll. It doesn’t look anything like me. It better not look anything like me. It’s a ringer for Erik Estrada. No joke. How weird is that?”
Well, maybe Eric Estrada in drag…
“Well, it’s not good drag. It doesn’t even have blonde hair! It’s got this non descript brown stuff sprouting from its head and a perma-tan. I mean, what’s it supposed to be? I can’t look at it.”
So when she’s re-enacting martial arts battles against action men, does she – like my little boy (shut up, he can do what he wants) – have to use the Daphne figures from the Scooby Doo cornflakes box instead?
“See, I did like Daphne doll,” she exclaims proudly. “She was cool. And that’s good about your little boy because there must be worse girl action figures out there for little boys to play with. If he wanted to play with the Paris Hilton doll, for example, then, as a mother, you’d be very frightened. But I was in Japan working, so I missed out on the cereal boxes. I would have really liked that too. Pouring out breakfast – and out comes a little me and a little Freddie.”
Freddie, of course, is Freddie Prinze Jr., her Scooby Doo co-star and real-life husband. The pair married in Mexico in 2002, having lived together since 1997, but then neither seems the type for hasty Hollywood whirlwind affairs. Both are renowned for their professional dedication, their willingness to work long hours (during Season Three of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Sarah was so involved in her work schedule she had yet to twig the show’s popularity) and an intense respect for their image and fan-base.
Unfortunately for tabloids everywhere, this shared work ethic prevents the couple from engaging in spectacular spats and drunken antics. But hang on a minute. Sarah Michelle Gellar has been acting ever since she was talent spotted in Manhattan at the tender age of four. Why didn’t she go off the rails like a normal child actress? Where are the debauched nights out with Lindsay Lohan and the Hilton sisters? Where’s the torrid affair with Colin Farrell?
“Okay, I think my husband might have something to say if I were seen near Colin Farrell,” she giggles. “Here’s what I think. I was always a working child actress, but that was it. It was work. I was never famous as a kid. So I grew up away from the limelight and I was allowed to develop properly as a person.
“I feel so sorry for those girls. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to have everyone watching when you’re still trying to figure out who you are. And it’s not fair to keep putting all this fame on the shoulders of really, really young girls. They’re not equipped to deal with it. You’re setting them up for a fall and meanwhile Angelina Jolie is playing Colin Farrell’s mother. What is this youth fixation? Let’s see some lines on people’s faces. They add character. I’m not saying I’d never have surgery. God knows how I’ll feel at fifty, but putting poison in your face? I’m too much of a germaphobe.”
Where’s her Howard Hughes’ style latex gloves for greeting all the different journalists then?
“Oh wow, can you imagine what they’d start saying about me if I actually started doing that? That’d be something.”
Currently, Sarah can be seen in The Grudge, a remake of the Japanese chiller released earlier this year. Like many voguish J-horrors, The Grudge features a vengeful spirit murdering from beyond the grave and Ms. Gellar takes it upon herself to investigate the subsequent maelstrom of mutilated corpses and profound familial disquiet.
Happily, the original writer/director Takashi Shimuzu was retained for the purposes of the Hollywood version, as was the chilling Tokyo setting, so The Grudge retains all the menace of the original. If anything, the visiting American girl-sleuth stumbling around a terrifying Japanese house gives the film an added dimension, sort of like an inverse Lost In Translation, where everything disorientates rather than enchants. It was a brave new world for Sarah Michelle as well as her onscreen equivalent.
“In the infancy of the shoot it was a little weird,” she explains. “I walked on set with a sandwich once, not realising that the Japanese don’t eat on set. I didn’t do that again. I had to get used to the translators too, but that was fine. Art is universal, after all. A painting isn’t just a painting in its country of origin. But I loved Japan. It made me rethink so many things. I mean, I’m not from Hollywood – thank God – but I do live there and everything there is about youth and novelty. Can I inject myself with botulism, please? Our newscasters are telling you about a train wreck and they can’t move their mouths from the smiling position. On Buffy when they introduced Dawn, my kid sister, The New York Times ran an article saying ‘Well, Buffy’s getting on in years’. Please! I was twenty-two. What I loved about Japan is that age is revered because wisdom comes with experience. That just makes so much sense to me.”
I take it then the Tokyo backdrop and Takashi Shimuzu’s involvement worked as incentives to get her on board?
“Definitely,” she says excitedly. “I loved the original so this movie was an absolute passion for me. I mean, I thought Gore Verbinski’s The Ring was a great film, but it had an American director and American location and it lost something because the original was so steeped in Japanese lore. That’s true of The Grudge too. I love the very Japanese idea in the movie that strong emotions can transcend life and death. I’m a logical person, but emotions can spill out and have a presence of their own. We’ve all walked into a room where some couple have had a fight and you can just feel it. So when I heard Takashi was hired for the job, I knew the remake would keep that and I just thought ‘Yes! It’s about fucking time!”
Considering her long-standing interest in martial arts and her choice of hotel, would it be .
fair to speculate, or indeed, hope, that she has something of an oriental fetish?
“Yeah, I probably do,” she admits. “I not only love Japan but I’m really onto Japanese movies and Asian films generally. Here’s the thing. Asian cinema – for whatever reason – doesn’t get the kind of global exposure that a lot of national cinemas enjoy. I can’t understand that because we watch a lot of movies in my house. It’s the most innovative, inventive, exciting cinema in the world. We got in a print of Hero two years ago. As far as I’m considered, even movies like Shaolin Soccer should be in every cinema and not enough people appreciate what Quentin Tarantino did with Kill Bill. Do you like Asian movies?”
Er, you might say that if you had a particular talent for understatement. Having spent years trying to foist Asian movies on my girlfriends to no real avail, I’ve finally found a woman I can talk to about the meaningful things in life. So I do. At considerable length. As does she.
Of course, I had heard previously that Sarah Michelle Gellar was something of a dream interviewee, always ready with good quote and easy laughter, but she’s quite bowled me over by this point. When not nattering about chop socky classics in a manner far too, er, specialised (well, I would say special) to relate here or swapping delightfully girlie anecdotes about handbags and pyjamas and chapsticks (“Don’t leave home without one. Or at least don’t leave home without your germ-free best friend having one…”), she’s completely disarming me by prefacing what she says with sweet nothings like “I wouldn’t normally say this to a journalist, but we get on so great.” Pretty smart for an actress, huh?
“You’re not the first person to tell me that,” she retorts. “And I’m a blonde actress too. Although I should confess that I’m not a real blonde.”
That’s quite alright. Everybody knows that real blondes become librarians. It’s the peroxide variety that get to have more fun and are preferred by gentlemen.
“Except for Reese Witherspoon,” points out Sarah Michelle. “She’s a smart, natural blonde actress, so she has it made. She’s definitely the one.”
In addition to appeasing my considerable ego and humouring my inner-geek, it’s clear that Ms. Gellar is smart as a cat o’ nine tails and funny as hell. If only all my interviews were like this, Mr. Stokes wouldn’t have to pay me all those sums of money and I’d be one happy giantess film bunny!
Is she too good to be true? Is there something awful lurking behind the sunny façade that is Sarah Michelle Gellar? She did look awfully comfortable essaying Cruel Intentions’ uber-bitch and she is very active in the horror world.
“No,” she whispers conspiratorially. “This is me and that is acting. To tell you the truth I used to feel bad going home at night from Cruel Intentions. I had to keep telling myself, ‘It’s for the movie. It’s for the movie’. I liked doing Daphne better because now little kids wave at me. It was so funny the first time that happened. I was in a hotel and all these kids started following me around. So I was wondering what kind of sick parents are letting their under-fives sit up to watch Buffy every night? Then it dawned on me that it was a Scooby Doo thing.”
She must be an eternal disappointment to the National Enquirer, this one. It’s just not very Hollywood having little kids running after you because they think you’re Daphne and bigger people running after you because you’re Buffy – yet retaining a grasp of normality.
“Well, I’m not from LA so that helps,” chirps Sarah Michelle. “I don’t blame LA for being the way it is. It has got to be the only city in the world with just one art form and one industry. Don’t get me wrong. I have nice friends there. I like living in a house. I love having a lawn. It just seems so natural to be walking around on grass with your dogs. But every month Freddie and I spend a week in New York too. It keeps you normal and I’m a little bit of a New York nationalist. I think Manhattan should secede! I mean, there’s a couple of things wrong with New York, but I’m sure I’ll fix those when I’m governor.”
Wait up. Don’t tell me in addition to being an accomplished ice-skater, martial artist and actress, she plans on hitting the political sector as well? Leave some stuff for everybody else, why don’t you?
“Don’t worry,” she reassures me. “The world of politics is safe from me. I have no political aspirations. I won’t even answer political questions. I get really fearful when I hear about actors getting involved in the political process. The thought of people voting based on their like or dislike of a celebrity is terrifying. Can there be a worse reason for voting? If I had a political science degree maybe I’d feel differently. I consider myself intelligent and informed but not enough to start making policies.”
She may not be ready for governorship just yet, but Ms. Gellar is rightly proud of her considerable achievements to date. Of course, Buffy The Vampire Slayer holds a special place in her heart, especially when I pull out a survey from Seventeen magazine about common dreams among teenagers. In an equivalent study from the eighties, most young girls dreamed about being chased, being kidnapped or being interfered with in some way. Two years ago guess what the most popular dream was? It involved living in Sunnydale, having Willow as a best friend and carrying a stake as a weapon of choice.
“That’s so great,” she cries. “When I was growing up, my role-model was Tutti on rollerskates. Nowadays we turn on a TV and take for granted that a woman is playing a superhero or a spy or a lawyer or a doctor. When I was a kid we could only get the nurse roles. I’m so excited. Maybe it’s the big takeaway coffee.”
It’s way past time to go and as we walk to the lift the girl still keeps impressing me.
“This was fun, huh? Most of the time doing interviews I keep realising where they got that sketch about Horse And Hound magazine in Notting Hill. I wish Freddie were here. We could have had a great time talking about Asian movies.”
Oh well. Maybe next time. As I wave a fond goodbye, I am, to use the jargon of Sarah Michelle’s immediate botoxed environs, practically missing her already. And just when I’d finally gotten over missing Buffy too. b

The Grudge is released on November 5th