For so many young women who grew up in the 90s and beyond, Sarah Michelle Gellar redefined what it meant to be a leading woman. As Buffy Summers — the Valley girl turned vampire slayer — she gave a generation of viewers something that felt genuinely new: a female hero who was strong and funny and fallible, all at once.
It’s a legacy that has only grown in the years since. From the iconic Helen Shivers in I Know What You Did Last Summer to the darkly comedic Kathryn in Cruel Intentions, the through-line in Gellar’s career choices is hard to miss — she has always gravitated toward the genre where, as she puts it, the interesting roles actually lived.
“For so long the [horror] genre was one of the only genres that women could really lead and be the heroes,” she tells marie claire Australia. “That’s where the interesting roles existed.”
Horror, she argues, was doing something progressive long before Hollywood started talking about it. Where more “respectable” genres kept women on the margins, horror handed them the story. “In genre, you really can buy into the narrative so differently,” she says. “You can have these flawed people in these situations that can then save the day.”
As iconic as many of Gellar’s characters have been, she notes “it’s not always easy” to find new roles worthy of the legacy she’s built a career on.
“You pick jobs for different reasons and I never wanna be the girl that’s there just to be there,” she tells us, “I always want her to have a purpose and be three dimensional and to be flawed and not perfect and to be real.”
For her upcoming film, Ready Or Not 2, Gellar joins the returning Samara Weaving in a darkly comic horror sequel that plunges back into the blood-soaked chaos of not just the Le Domas family but a council of four rival families. And it’s safe to say there’s nothing perfect or two-dimensional about her character, Ursula.
In the first look at the new film, loyal fans of the actress may have noticed a rather Buffy-esque moment: Ursula driving a sharp, stake-like object clean through someone’s chest.
“I didn’t get the correlation when we were filming it,” Gellar admits with a laugh, “My character uses a dueling pistol and you have to pack the gunpowder in a dueling pistol. So that’s the piece of the dueling pistol that I stabbed her with. I didn’t get how close it looked [to a stake].
“When I saw the trailer and everyone said it, I was like, ‘oh, I see it’. Now, Sam and I make jokes about it.”
She’s quick to point out that Ursula and Buffy don’t have much else in common — “I think they’re pretty much the antithesis of each other, the way they look at the world” — but she’s not exactly complaining about the comparison. “It works for me,” she adds.
So, what drew her to the film, specifically? The ability to explore a complex woman like Ursula, yes — but more than that, it was the spirit of what the first film had managed to pull off.
“So much of Hollywood right now I feel like is, you know, let’s try to be the next this or be the next this as opposed to trying to be the new something that everyone else wants to copy and Ready Or Not was its own genre. It was horror, but it was action. But it was comedy, but it was the story of family — and had these sort of deeper meanings.”
The sequel, she says, takes that foundation and pushes it inward. Where the original was about the chaos of marrying into a murderous family, this one turns its attention to the relationships already inside it — siblings, rivalries, the kind of history you can’t outrun. “This one was much more about the inner relationships within the family,” she explains. “A lot of brother and sister, sister-sister dynamics.”
Then, there was the matter of the five-year-long wait for the sequel to come to life.
“It took them so long,” she says of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, “which really makes you realize that they were spending their time to really find what the right story is.”
Thirty years in, it seems the interesting roles and right stories are still finding her too.
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