FHMs interview with sarah Michelle Geller(sept 2000)

THERE ARE MORE THAN TWO MILLION
vegetarian ladies in the United Kingdom and
most are easy to spot by the wind chimes and
African tribal masks cluttering up their flat, the
energy crystal around their neck and their
refusal to prune their unruly thatch of underarm
hair. However, many are more devious and the
first indication that they think ‘meat is murder”
will be when you sit down for Sunday lunch,
only to be confronted by a meal which the main
ingredient appears to be twigs. Thankfully for
the hamburger-scoffing man, 23-year-old Sarah
Michelle Gellar, star of the The series Buffy The
Vampire Slayer, isn’t one of them. “I’m well
known for my barbecues,” says Sarah. “I’m a
meat eater, I’m really carnivorous. A little steak
never hurt anybody.”
Food has indeed played a big part in Sarah’s
career, she was discovered by an agent in a
Manhattan restaurant at the age of four and one
of her first jobs was a TV advertisement for
Burger King — which made the wee nipper
public enemy number one of the McDonaldis
corporation, as the ad knocked the size of their
burgers and ended up with the two superpowers
of the fast food industry slugging it out in court
‘I remember a friend had a birthday party at
McDonalds,” she says. Because of the legal case I
didn’t think I was allowed to eat there. So I put
on a hat and sunglasses and only had a soda.”
Despite that hiccup, Sarah’s acting career
took off when she won the role of Kendall Han
in daytime soap All My Children— in 1993
winning the Best Younger Actress Emmy. But she
found her first week on the show something of a
steep learning curve. I locked my little sister in a
crypt. Then I burned my parents’ divorce papers
and tried to seduce my stepfather. When he
turned me down, I slept with the stable boy and
then cried rape and went to jail.”
The day after winning her award, she
announced she was to quit. But this didn’t mean
sitting at home with her feet up, gloating on her
success, as Sarah is a self-confessed workaholic,
regularly working a fifteen-hour day — “I can
sleep when I’m dead” — and landed the role of
Buffy, although she originally auditioned for the
part of airhead Cordelia.
Just like the 1992 movie it was based on
(starring Kristy Swanson and Beverly Hills
90210’s Luke Perry) Buffy The Vampire Slayer
wasn’t an overnight success — in its first season
in the US it was ranked 100 out of 107 shows —
but now the likes of Finland, Hungary, Sweden
and Rornania are familiar with the troubled
school life of Buffy Summers as she juggles a
vampire boyfriend, denizens of the underworld
feasting on students and most imponantly,
getting the right grades in math.
Sarah has also been forging an impressive
movie career appearing in horror flicks I Know
What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2, the romantic
comedy Simply Irresistible and Cruel Intentions in
which she and co-star Selma Blair performed a
lengthy lesbian smooch. The kiss lived so long in
the memory it scooped the award for “Best kiss” at
this year’s MTV’s Golden popcorn Awards. The
next movies Sarah has squeezed into her hiatus
from filming Buffy is the drama Harvard Man and
the thriller The It Girl both slated for a 2001 release

With the success of Buftfy and her movie
career, Sarah’s life has dramatically changed, but
refreshingly fame isn’t something she has just
taken for granted. “There’s no question I live a
very strange life,” she said last year, after
journeying to the Dominican Republic to help
the charity Habitat For Humanity build
accommodation for the homeless. “I’ve just
come from two weeks in New York, hosting
Saturday Night Live, living the princess’s dream—
I had a car to whisk me wherever I wanted to go

We’ve heard there’s a Bluffy drinking game where
every time you catch a cheeky glimpse of Buffy’s
bra strap you have to down a drink
"Yeah, in the first season they always made me wear
tank tops. I was about 15 pounds heavier and a full
cup size bigger and I wasn’t going to wear tops
without a bra, so you always saw the straps. I was
thinking, Great, I’m adding to the drunk rate in
America.’ but for the second season I discovered
strapless bras and it ruined the whole game."

There must be hundreds of disappointed teenage
boys across America craving for a peek of your bra
strap. They'll have to think up something else...
Or I’ll get a boob job, one of the two.
In Bluffy your mentor is played by Anthony Stewart
Head who’s more famous in the UK as the guy
from the soppy Gold Blend adverts.
It’s also a very famous advert in the US, so when
I was auditioning I was sitting next to him and I
was like, “Oh my God I’ve got the coffee guy
sitting next to me.” But the ending was never
shown in the US so we never found out what
finally happened.
You studied streetfighting. Does that mean you’re
tasty with your fists?
No, it just means hand-to-hand fighting I
studied tae kwon do and now I’m learning kick
boxing and gymnastics. I can probably look
after myself if somebody attacked me, I hope I
would never be in the situation where I’d need
to—I carry Mace forthat.
In Cruet Intentions you played a real bitch, were
you treated like that when you were at school?
Oh yeah I grew up in New York City so I knew
them all. I was an outcast in Junior High School.
I was an academic and working all the time and
that made me different from everyone else. They
basically didn’t talk to me, I had two friends and
that was it. I hated it.
Were you a rebellious teenager?
I was a parfier at high school, I explored when it
was OK to do so. Can you imagine if I had my
wild phase now — everyone would know about it.
You went to your first club at 15. Did you have to
get permission from your mum?
Actually I was probably a bit younger and no, I
didn’t have to sneak out of the house—my mum
didn’t mind as long as I did things safely I wanted
to see what the inside of The Limelight was like,
and taste my first drink. It’s not in my nature to do
stupid things, 1 mean I have done stupid things...
What sort of stupid things?
Like you think I’m going to let you guys put that
in print?
You drive a big red Land Rover. Have you ever gone
off-roading?
They have this thing in LA. where you go up to
the mountains and they show you how to do it,
but I haven’t had a Saturday off to go yet. but I
read the funniest thing about my car—I was in a
supermarket with my friends and they picked up
a magazine and it said, “Sarah Gellar has just
bought her first car, but she doesn’t like to drive
it in the rain because she’s afraid it will get dirty
Can you imagine? How ridiculous is that? My
car gets a lot of birthday gifts, I got a hands-free
adapter for my phone and a police radar
So have you been stopped by the cops?
Yes, but not for speeding. I was stopped for
having tinted windows, which is illegal in LA.
We get a Lot of readers writing in, depressed
because they’re Losing their hair. Do you find bald
men sexy?
Oh yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine who’s
convinced he’s going bald, and I was joking about
his receding hairline. I was like, “There are a lot of
sexy bald men” and he was ]ike, “Name one” and I
said, ‘Telly Savalas.” He didn’t speak to me for two
weeks. But I love guys with shaved heads, I think
Bruce Willis is real sexy I’d date a bald man, I like
it when their hair comes back a little bit and you
can feel the stubble on the back of their heads.
we’ve noticed that you’ve got tattoos...
Yeah, I have a Chinese symbol for integrity on my
back, and one on my ankle which is a heart and a
knife. I find tattoo’s addictive — I want to put a
chain around one of my ankles. im not worried
about scarring my body, if I don’t like them when
I’m older I’ll just get rid of them. My stunt double
had to have hers removed from her arm because I
don’t have one there.
Last year you were voted FHM’s 100 Sexiest
Woman In The World. Did it change your life?
It’s an honour, but they obviously don’t know
me. They obvious]y don’t see me first thing in
the morning, before people come to fix my face
and hair. It’s so weird, PeopleMagazinepublishef
their 50 Most Beautiful Women In The World
when we were filming Cruel Intentions and my
co-star Ryan Phillipe teased me unmercifully: it
was like, ‘Oh let’s do what one of the most
beautiful women in the world wants to do.”