Sarah Michelle Gellar “Ringer” Interview

Sarah Michelle Gellar “RINGER” Interview
By Abbie Bernstien

Sarah Michelle Gellar’s return to series TV in the CW’s RINGER was highly anticipated. For one thing, there’s the premise, crafted by show runners Eric C. Charmelo and Nicole Snyder. Rich Siobhan and poor Bridget, both played by Gellar, are twin sisters. Bridget, fleeing the Mob in the Midwest, accepts Siobhan’s invitation to visit her in Manhattan. However, when Siobhan apparently commits suicide, Bridget is cornered into pretending to be her sister, whose life comes with husband Andrew (Ioan Gruffudd), a teenaged stepdaughter - and lover Henry (Kristoffer Polaha), who is married to Siobhan’s best friend Gemma (Tara Summers). As if all this isn’t enough, it turns out that Siobhan is still alive and has set Bridget up to be murdered.

However, the other and perhaps more urgent reason RINGER drew so much attention is that Gellar’s last series regular gig was as the title heroine of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. Gellar’s seven years on the series - five on the WB, then two on UPN, the networks which merged together to form the CW - saw the rise of a passionate fandom that burst the confines of pop culture to spill over into the mainstream. It’s possible to find plenty of people who didn’t watch BUFFY when it was on, a bit harder to find folks who never caught up with it in ongoing syndication, DVD and/or continuing comic books, and very difficult to find someone who has never heard of BUFFY at all.

Born in New York, Gellar started acting at a young age. She withstood the ferocious pace of production on daytime soaps to win a Daytime Emmy for her performance as Kendall Hart Lang on ALL MY CHILDREN and she’s been in a number of feature films, including the first two English-language GRUDGE films, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER - which also starred Prinze, whom she later married - and the contemporary update of DANGEROUS LIAISONS, CRUEL INTENTIONS, in which Gellar plays the manipulative Kathryn Merteuil.

At press time, it’s unclear whether RINGER will be renewed for a second season, but it’s definite that Gellar has had a blast in her dual roles. The actress, now expecting her second child with husband Freddie Prinze Jr., spoke to the press at a party thrown by CBS and its fellow networks CW and Showtime. At her side was her TV husband, Welsh-born actor Gruffudd.

Gellar says she is happy to once again be involved with a weekly scripted television drama. “I love it. I didn’t realize how much I missed the atmosphere until I started back. And there’s something about television and having these characters take a journey and seeing the same people every day and looking forward to the scripts - I love it. I’m loving it more than I thought I was going to.”

The lengthy absence from television is something Gellar addresses forthrightly. “I think [most people] know I was very burned out after BUFFY. It was exhausting. I was eighteen on the pilot and I was twenty-four and married when we finished. I never had time. That show was my life. I did movies on the hiatuses, and I sort of needed to explore and live that gypsy lifestyle, and I traveled, and I worked with amazing actors - Andy Garcia, Alec Baldwin, Brendan Fraser, Forest Whitaker, Lee Pace. It was this great learning experience, and then I started watching a lot of television. I was always in these foreign countries, and then I would get the shows on TV. And then I started to realize that all the great 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.”

RINGER offers two great roles for the same woman, as Gellar says she found in the pilot script. “I think when I got excited the most is when I started reading it. I thought, ‘Okay, I see where this is going, I get it, I get it,’ and then you get to Page Twenty, and it’s like, ‘What? What?!’ And I’m very rarely surprised by stuff like that, so I think that to me was the general surprise.”

The appeal of doing RINGER is both the overall experience and the quality of the scripts, Gellar adds. “It’s a combination. I mean, I think the nomadic lifestyle [of working in feature films] does work for a lot of people, but for me, I’ve traveled, I’ve seen [other countries] - I want to be able to go home at night and see my daughter, I want to be there for her first day of school and her school recital and honestly, television is what offers me that. They’ve been amazing about working around schedules. Her last day of school I was able to go to - all the big milestones, I’m there for.”

How does Prinze feel about staying home with their young daughter? “He loves it,” Gellar reports cheerfully. “He’s perfectly happy to stay at home and put the baby to bed and send me out.”

Gruffudd, whose spouse is actress Alice Evans of VAMPIRE DIARIES fame, adds, “My wife told me she couldn’t wait to get rid of me back to work.”

Yet another factor in Gellar choosing RINGER, she says, is that these are the sorts of roles she thinks will appeal to her fans. “When picking a show, I took into consideration who my fans are, because let’s be honest, [with BUFFY], we were a midseason replacement on The WB based on a failed movie. If it wasn’t for the outpouring of fans and journalists supporting us, we would have been canceled. As an actor, sure, you want to stretch your wings and you want to do different things, but I think it’s also our job to think about who our fans are and what they want to see, too. Because I do it to entertain the people who want to watch what I do.”

With Siobhan attempting to commit fratricide and Bridget pulling herself out of substance addiction, does Gellar relate to either of her RINGER characters? Gellar says she feels for both women. “We all have a good side and a bad side. I’m not necessarily more like either one of the characters, [but] in their motivations, they both feel kind of justified, because their journeys in both of their minds are justified. In terms of Siobhan, it’s funny to call her a bitch, but something happened that was so tragic and all of her motivations are based on what happened to her and how it changed her life. Bridget just made a lot of mistakes, but ultimately, she’s trying to improve herself and I think everybody can understand what it’s like when you want to make better the mistakes you’ve made in the past. It’s complicated, but I love it. I mean, it brings back to me CRUEL INTENTIONS and I think [that film's Kathryn is] one of my favorite characters, aside from Buffy, that I’ve ever played. Making her sympathetic, even though she did horrible things, there was a reason behind them, and that’s essentially the same thing I’m trying to do. ”

Playing two characters who have scenes with one another is easier now with recent advances. “They actually cloned me,” Gellar quips. “We thought we’d take advantage of modern technology and Dolly [the sheep is] playing the other twin.”

More seriously, Gellar notes that changes in special effects technology have been helpful on RINGER, but she believes that their interactions are more important than the optical tricks that allow it to happen. “You know what? [RINGER is] slightly less difficult than the other effects I’ve been involved with, because at its basis, you really just want the characters to have a conversation, and even though I think the visual effects are amazing in what we’re capable of doing, I don’t think that’s what the audience really cares about. We played with some of the face replacement,” Gellar refers to the technique of filming two actors in the same frame and replacing the face of one of the performers with the desired visage, “but ultimately, it’s about what the characters are saying, so I think it works best when we just talk to each other, and in a weird way, it actually goes very quickly, because you pare it down to the emotion of the scene, as opposed to being all fancy.”

Elaborating on how RINGER‘s effects are accomplished, Gellar says, “At the end of BUFFY, I did play three characters, and it was just old-school split screen. There’s so much more that’s available now between face replacement and the stop-motion camera. So during the pilot, we played with all of them, like kids with new toys, to figure out what works best. But ultimately what you find is, even though there is all this technology, you want the heart of the scene. So each time the twins are together, we try to do one shot where they touch each other or they cross over each other. [But] you’re not trying to do these crazy camera moves or crazy positions.”

Part of the appeal of RINGER for Gellar is its examination of the relationship between twins. “I’m fascinated by twins,” Gellar explains. “I’m an only child, so I don’t have a sibling, but I think about the bond that siblings have, and it intensifies so much when you think about being in the womb together. These are two girls that have shared everything, and they’re so close, and then something so tragic ripped them apart, and then it’s like losing a part of yourself, because twins are part of each other. I just think that’s so interesting.”

Most of the shows on the CW, whether they deal with Manhattanites, spies or vampires, have a similar serialized nature. Is there anything that makes RINGER stand apart from the pack? Gellar laughs. “Have you seen the men on my show? The other shows are all about the girls - we have men on my show. All joking aside, I think what’s really cool about the show - I’m a television watcher, and I get frustrated with shows sometimes when they set up [situations] and then they don’t give answers, and it’s just more questions and more questions. One of the things that’s really important to all of us is, we will give answers to the questions. Yes, they may bring up some more questions and more mysteries, but there will be answers and you will understand the motivations and why this happened.”

Is television much different from the days of BUFFY? Gellar thinks so. :”Oh, it’s changed so much. From the fact that there are so many channels available now - I mean, there was just really People and now [because of the Internet], to be able to keep your secrets for your show, it’s so hard. The beauty of our show is, we have to work extra-hard to keep that stuff.” However, unlike some other serialized shows, Gellar says RINGER consistently delivers. “You find something out every act break,” she laughs.

Gruffudd observes that RINGER also leaves room for viewer interpretation of who is ultimately good and who is ultimately bad. “This is the beauty of a show like this is, you’ve seen something in it that wasn’t necessarily there on the surface, and I think that’s going to be the exciting thing for us all as viewers, is that we all have our own ideas of where it’s going.”

There is a fair amount of action in RINGER, although the producers - unsurprisingly, given that Gellar accounts for two of their main characters - are protective of their leading lady. Even so, Gellar relates, “I got chased in downtown L.A. [which doubles for New York] and I did get to hold a gun. Buffy never got guns. [In RINGER], I’ve had a Glock.”

Asked how she feels about finally getting to play a grown-up character on television, Gellar replies that she’s already done this on BUFFY. “I think that Buffy was [a grown-up], and I think that was one of the amazing things about the show, is that I was able to grow with her. Yes, she started in high school, then she went to college, but essentially she was a mother to all of her Slayers, so I always felt like Buffy was a grown-up.”

How does Gellar look back on BUFFY now? “I’m proud of the show. I’m proud of the work we did and I’m proud of its legacy. That’s nothing but good things. As an actor, I think a lot of times when you start a show young, you get stuck, you get six years of [playing] 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. So I didn’t feel that I was trapped, because I got to do so much. And how many times in an actor’s life do you get to be part of something that has a legacy like that? I think it’s only fortunate - I don’t see the negative. And if people think I can save the world and kick butt, I’m okay with that.”

Back to RINGER, is there any pressure in heading up a new series? Gellar laughs. “Yes and no. I’m so proud of the show and I’m enjoying it so much. I hope it’s going to talk to fans, and if for some unbelievable reason it doesn’t, I’m having the best time and I don’t regret a minute of it.”

By Abbie Bernstien
Buzzy Mag Entertainment Reporter