After years of insisting she never wanted to play Buffy again, it looks like Sarah Michelle Gellar is getting back into the slaying business after all.
Per Deadline, Hulu is nearing an order for a pilot of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer revival, with Gellar “expected to star.” They report that Chloe Zhao, director of Nomadland and Marvel’s Eternals will direct the pilot for the new show. They also claim that Hulu has “high expectations for the project going to series” and that appearances from other Buffy stars of the past “is considered likely.”
They also claim Buffy franchise creator Joss Whedon is not involved in the new show, following various allegations of misconduct a few years ago.
The cast of Buffy The Vampire Slayer
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Whedon originally wrote Buffy as a feature film, with Kristy Swanson in the title role. Although the film was not a massive success, Whedon was able to turn the concept into a TV show which became one of the medium’s defining cult hits of the late ’90s and early 2000s. The Buffy TV series, now with Gellar in the lead, aired seven seasons on The WB Network and UPN; a spinoff series for Buffy’s doomed vampire love interest Angel lasted for five seasons on The WB, ending in 2004.
After Angel went off the air, Whedon and a variety of other characters have built out the “Buffyverse” with a variety of novels and comic books. But there hasn’t been a proper Buffy show in 20 years.
Gellar has long maintained she’s not interested in doing more Buffy. As recently, uh, two weeks ago, she quipped she’d need “a lot of plastic surgery” to play the part again, while adding that she was “happy with how we ended things with Buffy.”
Not that happy, it seems, because now Gellar is poised to pick up her stake for the first time in two decades.
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