Sarah Michelle Gellar — Buffy, and the Thirty Years Around It

An actress I was a fan of for a long time. Anyone who grew up on Buffy probably was.

Korean internet slang has a phrase for this: rijeu sijeol (리즈 시절), literally “one’s Leeds days” — from the Welsh footballer Alan Smith’s peak years at Leeds United. It means the absolute prime of someone’s career, the version of them everyone remembers. For a lot of us, hers was Sunnydale.

I went looking for what she is doing now and found a longer, bumpier career than I remembered. She has been working for over forty years.

Profile

Spotted at four

A talent agent noticed her in upper Manhattan when she was four. Two weeks later she auditioned for a TV film and impressed the directors by reading not only her own lines but her co-star Valerie Harper’s as well. It aired on CBS in January 1983.

Her childhood résumé is a lot: competitive figure skater who placed third at a New York state regional, black belt in taekwondo, partial scholarship at a prep school, 4.0 GPA on graduation.

She did a pile of commercials, and one of them caused an incident. A 1982 Burger King ad attacked McDonald’s directly — one of the first comparative attack ads in fast food. McDonald’s parent company sued everyone involved, and the fallout reportedly got a five-year-old banned from McDonald’s restaurants.

A Daytime Emmy at eighteen

In 1993 she joined ABC’s soap All My Children as Kendall Hart, the long-lost daughter of Susan Lucci’s Erica Kane. Reviewers noted she had the presence to go toe to toe with a veteran.

In 1995, at eighteen, she won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress. Then she left for Los Angeles.

The prime — Buffy (1997–2003)

She originally screen-tested for Cordelia. The producers asked her to read for the title role instead.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered in March 1997 and ran seven seasons, 144 episodes. A Saturn Award for Best Genre TV Actress, a Golden Globe nomination, four Teen Choice Awards. Entertainment Weekly put Buffy Summers on its list of the 100 greatest female characters in American television.

Why the character still lands is not complicated. She is strong and also whines; she saves the world and worries about homework. That combination barely existed on television at the time.

She sang in the musical episode “Once More, with Feeling,” which produced a 2002 cast album.

On leaving, she said:

This isn’t about leaving for a career in movies, or in theater — it’s more of a personal decision. I need a rest.

This stretch is the rijeu sijeol. EW’s top 12 entertainers of 1998, FHM’s number one in 1999, Glamour’s Woman of the Year in 2002, a Madame Tussauds waxwork the same year.

The films were not small either

She shot movies alongside Buffy. The lineup holds up.

Cruel Intentions is the one for me. Les Liaisons dangereuses relocated to an American high school, with her as the cocaine-addicted villain. Roger Ebert called her “effective as a bright girl who knows exactly how to use her act as a tramp.” She and Selma Blair won Best Kiss at the 2000 MTV Movie Awards, and that scene is still referenced.

Scooby-Doo got poor reviews and sold the most tickets of anything she has done. A.O. Scott noted she managed to add feminism to a stereotype.

So much horror that she is filed under scream queen. Her own take: horror offers actresses “the best roles” through which they “can really shine.”

Marriage

She met Freddie Prinze Jr. on the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997. They did not start dating until 2000 — three years later.

Engaged April 2001, married in Mexico on September 1, 2002. The ceremony was officiated by choreographer Adam Shankman, who had worked on Buffy.

In 2007 she legally changed her name to Sarah Michelle Prinze to mark five years of marriage. The photo above is from that same year. Two children, and they live in Los Angeles.

A marriage lasting more than twenty years in Hollywood is not common.

Afterwards — the bumpy part

The post-Buffy years were not a straight line.

Southland Tales (2006) split critics at Cannes and became a cult item later. The Return (2006) failed both commercially and critically. Possession (2009) went straight to DVD.

She returned to television in 2011 with Ringer on The CW, playing twin sisters. Reviews were mixed, the fanbase was loyal, and it lasted one season.

In 2013 came CBS’s The Crazy Ones, opposite Robin Williams. She reportedly lobbied for the part once she heard Williams was attached, and won a People’s Choice Award for it.

Then Williams died in 2014 and the show ended. Gellar went on a long hiatus, for a simple reason:

I’ve been working my entire life.

She raised her children instead.

The quiet years

She kept voice acting through them — the Seventh Sister in Star Wars Rebels (2015–2016), Teela in Netflix’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021), plus the Big Bang Theory finale in 2019.

She also ran a business. Foodstirs, an organic baking mix company she co-founded in 2015, was in 7,500 retailers by 2018 including Starbucks, Whole Foods and Walmart. She wound it down and sold her stake by 2022, and published a cookbook in 2017.

The Joss Whedon question

Hard to write about Buffy without it.

In February 2021, when co-star Charisma Carpenter made allegations of abuse against producer Joss Whedon, Gellar issued a public statement of support:

While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon.

In a 2023 interview she added: “I’ll never tell my full story because I don’t get anything out of it.”

Where she is in 2026

The last few years have been busy again.

• Wolf Pack (2023, Paramount+) — arson investigator; she also executive produced
• Dexter: Original Sin (2024–25) — Tanya Martin, Miami Metro’s forensics chief. A ten-episode arc that ended when the show was not renewed
• I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) — a cameo as Helen Shivers in a dream sequence, 28 years later. She called it “so surreal”
• Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (March 2026) — as Ursula Danforth. Her first major film role in fifteen years. SXSW premiere March 13, wide release March 20
• Star Search (Netflix revival, from January 2026) — lead judge
• Stop That Train with RuPaul, playing herself

There was bad news too. On March 14, 2026, Hulu passed on the new Buffy series she was set to star in and executive produce.

And at the September 2026 Emmys she reunited with David Boreanaz (Angel) for the first time in nine years. When he said Buffy and Angel were “endgame,” she replied:

Well, I guess we won’t find out!

That one line probably took out a few thousand fans

Better news: her Hollywood Walk of Fame star was confirmed in 2026.

About the photographs

Every photo here is under a free Creative Commons licence.

Originals are on Wikimedia Commons.

Note that there is not a single photo here from the prime itself. Everything from the Buffy years (1997–2003) belongs to networks, studios and press agencies. The oldest freely licensed photograph that exists is from 2007, four years after the show ended. The 2026 Emmys reunion is wire-service photography for the same reason.

For images from that era, Wikipedia and official channels are the place to go. Not a blog reposting them.

References

• Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Michelle_Gellar
• IMDb — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001264/
• Wikimedia Commons (photo originals) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Sarah+Michelle+Gellar&ns6=1