It’s been eight years since she last appeared on TV, but Sarah Michelle Gellar now returns to the small screen in Ringer, a new drama about twin sisters whose very different lives begin to intertwine. John Byrne reports.
Anyone who's watched TV over the last 20 years cannot but acknowledge the impact made by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Coming at a time when the ‘Girl Power’ hype surrounding the Spice Girls had already got younger sisters doing things for themselves, Buffy was a hugely influential role model for millions of teenage girls across the globe as she assertively led the charge from Sunnydale High against all kinds of demons and bloodsuckers. It was also a truly great show, which always helps.
Buffy ended eight years ago, and after movies, marriage and motherhood, Sarah Michelle Gellar is back in the medium that swept her to stardom and made her a heroine to millions. And not just in one role, but two.
She stars in Ringer, a new drama on Sky Living about twin sisters Bridget and Siobhan (both played by Gellar), who have grown apart over the last six years. Bridget, a recovering addict and ex-stripper, is on the run from the mob after witnessing a murder, and seeks refuge in sister Siobhan's home.
The sisters seem to be repairing their broken relationship until Siobhan mysteriously disappears during a boat trip. Bridget decides to solve her problems by assuming her sister’s identity, but soon discovers that Siobhan’s life in the privileged Hamptons is not as idyllic as it seemed.
Now, while it’s far from unusual these days to see actors going back and forth between TV and movies (mostly because modern movies suck and TV offers more interesting parts), it’s still a little surprising to see Sarah Michelle Gellar back on the box.
“It's so interesting”, she responds, when asked about her return. Not surprisingly, she had packed a lot into her years at Sunnydale. She recalls: “I was very burned out after Buffy. It was exhausting. It took me from . . . essentially I was 18 on the pilot, and I was 24 and married when we finished. I had never had time. That show was my life. I was doing movies on the hiatuses, weekends, and I needed to explore and live that gypsy lifestyle, so I travelled and I worked with amazing actors: Andy Garcia, Alec Baldwin, Brendan Fraser, Forest Whitaker. It was this great learning experience, and then I started watching a lot of television.”
It was only then that the seismic effect Joss Whedon’s Buffy had finally dawned on her. “I was always in these foreign countries, and I would get the shows on DVD”, she recalls. “And I started to realise that all of the amazing roles for women were on television. I was spoiled by Buffy because I thought that's the way it was everywhere, and it's not. I started to watch Damages, all these amazing female-driven shows, and it was something that was always in the back of my mind.”
Another factor was her family. While being a movie star might seem impossibly fascinating from the outside, like any other job, it has its downside. For anyone with a family, it tends to mean being away from home for chunks of the year. This was something that Gellar thought about as the years passed.
“Once I had my daughter [Charlotte, aged two], I realised that I was done living the romantic lifestyle, and although it works for some actors, I want to be home”, she concedes. “I want to put her to bed and get up with her in the morning, and I want to be there for her first day of school. And nothing offers that more than television. What's been so interesting for me getting back into it was that I didn't realise how much I missed it, how much I missed the excitement of getting the new episode and doing something different and seeing the same people and the family environment. If I hadn't had the time away, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate the experience that I'm having now. But that could just be my advanced age too”, she adds, tngue-in-cheek. “I don't know.”
As explained earlier, Ringer sees Gellar playing playing three characters: Bridget, Siobhan and then Bridget pretending to be Siobhan. Obviously that brings its own unique challenge, but she describes the parts as “interesting, it's like children. When you're each one, you have to love each one individually and understand that one. So when I'm Bridget, I feel that all of Bridget's motivations are hers and Siobhan is wrong. And when I'm Siobhan, everything Bridget does is wrong. I try to get into the head of each of them.”
During Buffy’s run, a major fuss was made of the fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar performed her own stunts. This time around there’s less emphasis on the physical side of things. “Well, due to my advanced age they're cutting them down a little bit because we are a little worried about the osteoporosis”, she jokes, before noting that “we don't have a ton of stunts in the sense of Buffy. There was a few stunts in the pilot. There was the crash through the wall, which they wouldn’t let me do, which I still don't understand why I couldn't do it – something about insurance. So far, it's only been running and chasing. She's not saving the world, she's just trying to save herself. But I do get to hold a gun a lot, which is cool because Buffy never got a gun.”
As her previous, hugely successful show keeps cropping up in conversation, it’s obvious that it’s going to impact on Ringer’s reception. Whether that’s a positive or a negative remains to be seen, but Gellar is hopeful that the global legions of Buffy admirers will be tuning in.
“That's all you can hope for”, she insists. “When picking a show, I took into consideration who my fans are, because, let's be honest, we were a mid-season replacement . . . based on a failed movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If it wasn't for the outpouring of fans, and the journalists too, supporting us, we would have been cancelled after four episodes. So as an actor, sure you want to stretch and you want to do different things, but it's also our job to think about who our fans are and what they want to see. Because, let's be honest, ultimately that's why we do this. I do it to entertain the people that want to watch what I do.”
Another thing she wanted to do was to work close to her family. After choosing to turn her back on the movie business to spend more time at home, it would seem pointless to film a TV show that didn’t allow her to go home every day after work.
“We're filming out here [in Los Angeles], because, again, that was important to me”, says the 34-year-old New York native. “My daughter goes to school here and my family is here. I had moved back to New York after Buffy, which was my home where I grew up, and I had been going back and forth. We'd kept our house out here. When I had the baby, my husband [Freddie Prinze Jr] was on 24 so we were based out here.”
But the jetlag began to mount. As anyone who’s ever flown between New York and Los Angeles will confirm, it’s as long a journey as the one from Ireland to New York, so doing that on a regular basis had to tell.
Gellar concedes that, “in our minds we had this idea that we could live this great nomadic lifestyle with the baby and fly back and forth. And then you take one airplane ride and you're like, ‘Yeah, that's not going to work.’ So ultimately we had to make a decision and we decided to give it a shot out here for a little bit. So when we decided to do the show, part of the deal was we were going to do it here.”
It’s not unusual to have New York-set shows filmed in Los Angeles. The universally popular Castle is one prime example. Sarah Michelle Gellar has her own view. “Being a jaded New Yorker”, she says, “I'm the first one to see a set and go ‘That doesn't look like New York!’ But I have to say I like the sets better now in LA than the real ones in New York. I guess I shouldn't say that, but I do. Well”, she adds, “I said it!”
Finally, there’s always the thought that – regardless of what she does or how successful she might be in other projects – in our minds Sarah Michelle Gellar will forever walk this earth as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s a consideration that doesn’t throw her.
“I'm proud of the show”, she insists. “I'm proud of the work we did and I'm proud of its legacy, and so that's nothing but good things.
"Sure, as an actor you want to play different things, but I was also really fortunate. A lot of times when you start a show at a young age, you get stuck, you get six years of high school, and I didn't have that. Buffy grew. She was a student. She went to college, and then essentially she became a mother. She was a mother to all the slayers. So I didn't feel that I was trapped because I got to do so much. And how many times in any actor's life do you get to be a part of something that has a legacy like that? So it's only fortunate. I don't see the negative. And if people think that I can save the world and kick butt, I'm OK with that.”
Ringer, Thursday, Sky Living
