‘Wolf Pack’: Sarah Michelle Gellar Wants To Create ‘Safety Net’ She Didn’t Have In ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’

‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ is one of the cult series par excellence. Broadcast between 1997 and 2003, its success created a legion of fans and even led to it being the subject of academic study, as well as being a major influence on later fantasy television. The series launched Sarah Michelle Gellar to worldwide fame and made her a popular culture icon.. However, the memory of the actress in her years as Buffy Anne Summers is not as sweet as the impact of the series might indicate.

The conversation surrounding ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ has changed in recent years following allegations against its creator, Joss Whedon, accused among other things of exhibiting abusive and tyrannical behavior and of creating a bad atmosphere on the set, especially for young actresses, which led to the collapse of the facade she built with her works as a champion of feminism and girl power. Since then the actresses who have worked with him have expressed themselves, corroborating the rumors, in particular Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia), the main victim of Whedon’s behavior (according to rumors, he would have punished her for getting pregnant during the filming of ‘Angel’ ). ‘, bullying her character and then firing her without consideration), and Michelle Trachtenberg (Dawn), who ensured that there was an unwritten rule in the series team so that no one would leave her alone with Whedon (a claim the producer has categorically denied). In response to the controversy, Gellar released a statement in support of the women on the series, and while he hasn’t shared any first-person stories, he clarified that, though I’m proud to be Buffy Summers, “I don’t want to be associated with the name Joss Whedon forever”.

Though he referred to the filming of ‘Buffy’ as “a toxic male environment” and made it clear that his relationship with Whedon was not, and is not, very good, Gellar prefers to handle the matter with discretion. However, her husband, also actor Freddie Prinze Jr., has no problem sharing her experience: “He had to put up with a lot of shit on that show in the seven years he was on it.. The things that pushed her through, with no real credit or paycheck, while she was often the only one working 15 hour days…yet she was able to deliver that character’s message every week, and it did it with pride and professionalism”.. Emma Caulfield, who played Anya in “Buffy,” also defends Gellar, noting the pressure she’s endured on a daily basis in silence: “It was obvious Sarah lacked the support to be the leader she needed and wanted to be. There was a tremendous amount of resentment and hostility against her from a certain someone, and I think we can all guess now who it is”..

Two decades after its demise, the narrative of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ has been rewritten to focus on a cinematic experience “toxic”, especially affecting its protagonist, who was the one who had to spend the most time on set with Whedon. With that tremendously bittersweet experience behind her, Gellar tackles her return to television in ‘Wolf Pack’, spin-off of ‘Teen Wolf’ in which, in addition to having a central role, she works as a producer. Opportunities that he took to create a better environment than the one he experienced in his time. As she tells The Hollywood Reporter in an in-depth interview, Gellar’s job as a producer involves becoming protector and advisor to the four protagonists of the new fiction, aged between 19 and 21, to whom she gave the number of her phone. the promise to deal with your problems with discretion.

In the same report, Jeff Davis, producer of ‘Wolf Pack’ and creator of ‘Teen Wolf’ highlights the importance of having someone like Gellar as producer of the series: “I have teenagers running around half naked and while it’s crucial to have the privacy coordinator, it’s also really important to have Sarah there, because she’s been where I am now. She knows her stuff.”. And it’s not an empty promise, far from it. In fact, he’s already put it into practice, firing a crew member who made a cast member feel uncomfortable by offering back massages. Gellar wants to do what she can to prevent the new generation from going through the same thing she and her colleagues did: “I hope I created an infrastructure, a safety net for these actors that I didn’t have”He says. “My Generation Didn’t Have It”.

From Vampire Slayer to Detective

The arrival of Sarah Michelle Gellar in the universe of ‘Teen Wolf’ is something of a closure of the cycle for the actress, since the franchise of Jeff Davis drinks heavily from ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, one of its main ( and obvious) influences. The actress joins ‘Wolf Pack’, a spin-off featured as a “descendant of ‘Buffy'”where does he play Kristin Ramsey, a famous investigator who lives with a personal loss and must find the person responsible for the fire that awakened a terrifying supernatural creature in Californiachanging the lives of a group of teenagers.

‘Wolf Pack’ will be released in the US on January 26 via Paramount+. While it doesn’t have a release date in Spain yet, The series, like the film “Teen Wolf”, is expected to be part of the SkyShowtime cataloga platform that brings together Universal and Paramount titles, whose launch in Spain is scheduled for February.