Ahead of this May marking the twenty-year anniversary of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s last bow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its Season 7 finale, the actress is back in the supernatural TV space with Wolfpack. The new series follows a pair of teens coming to terms with their new identities as werewolves amidst their home of Los Angeles going ablaze in a massive (and mysterious) forest fire. When CinemaBlend spoke to Gellar about her starring and producing role on Wolfpack, she couldn’t shake her vampire-slaying roots.
While speaking to Sarah Michelle Gellar for her upcoming series (coming to those with a Paramount+ subscription) about what was important to her when coming back to the subgenre all this time later, she hit us with an A+ Buffy pun. Here’s what she said:
I don’t think it’s about supernatural TV experience, it’s just about experience in general. And that when you’ve been doing it for as long as I have and you’ve seen things, you can take that experience and then you can bring it to your next one to make that an even better experience and you can build from there on. And, I think it’s also the way to make sure that your voice gets heard in terms of the story that you wanna tell. Because so often it goes through different iterations when you get notes and this way you really have an actual stake, all pun intended, in what the final product is.
It’s no secret that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s time on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was no walk in the park. The actress has previously recalled her experience “wasn’t rosy,” also alluding to an “extremely toxic male set” amidst other actresses speaking out about allegations of abuse aimed toward the show’s creator Joss Whedon. Gellar’s husband Freddie Prinze Jr. also recently spoke to the actress dealing “with a lot of bullshit” on the seven-season series.
Gellar is now many years removed from her role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and got to bring her experience to Wolfpack. As she cleverly shared, she could really put her “stake” in the series as both a producer and actress who got to be present for the young cast leading the show. Sarah Michelle Gellar also shared why exploring werewolf lore this time around was exciting for her with these words:
Well, I think when you go back in terms of lore, these stories were created to explain the unexplainable things at night that you know are out there that you’re scared of, which is usually your own emotions. And we sort of create these stories behind them to deal with them. And the idea that when the moonlight, when it’s a full moon, it’s, there’s the most light. So it’s your one chance to see the scaries. And I think that there’s something really beautiful in that lore. And I also love the idea of the pack. When you start thinking about wolves are in a pack, they’re almost smarter than us. It takes us a lot longer to find our pack than it would normally take a wolf to get theirs. And it’s like, you can really learn from that in terms of what they gather from their pack around them.
Wolfpack is created by Teen Wolf’s Jeff Davis and based on the novel by Edo Van Belkom. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the chief arson investigator in charge of looking into the Los Angeles wildfire that leads to werewolves biting two teens. Westworld’s Rodrigo Santoro additionally plays a park ranger who is the father to a pair of teen werewolves. The series premieres on January 26, with additional episodes coming out weekly on Thursdays.
While there have long been plans for a Buffy reboot, Sarah Michelle Gellar doesn’t seem to be planning on returning to the role anytime soon, though she did throw out her pick for an actress. As Gellar’s return undoubtedly gets us nostalgic to revisit her original supernatural series, you can check out our ranking of every Buffy season here on CinemaBlend.
