This movie didn’t exactly slay for Sarah Michelle Gellar.
The actress, 48, revealed that, at first, she wasn’t thrilled with how the 2002 live-action movie, “Scooby-Doo” turned out.
Gellar played Daphne, alongside her husband Freddie Prince Jr. as Fred, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy and Linda Cardellini as Velma.
“I’ve had a whole trajectory with this movie,” the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” star explained while on the “Shut Up Evan” podcast earlier this month. “Because there was a time where I really was upset about it. And it was not the movie I set out to make.”
“Now, in hindsight, all these years later, I totally appreciate it,” Gellar continued. “And I love it and it’ll totally make me laugh. But there was a time where it was a disappointment in the sense of, you know, what we were sold was not what it was.”
“Basically, there were those ‘Brady Bunch’ movies and it was kind of like a satirical version of it and that’s what this was pitched as,” the “Ringer” alum detailed. “Fred was sleeping with all the groupies and I had this great line where we get into this fight and I slam the door in his face and I say, ‘And that ascot makes you look gay.’”
“It was all the things you think about while watching,” Gellar confessed. “There were more stoner jokes – all the things that you think. Then, in the end, they decided for their audience, and by the way, they were right in that sense, that this movie worked better as a kids movie and to make it a family movie you have to take those things out of it.”
The “Swans Crossing” star said she was young, “22 maybe, and I wanted to make the sexier, more esoteric version, but that’s not what the audiences wanted.”
“Now, I appreciate it,” Gellar admitted, “but at the time I was a little like, ‘That wasn’t what i wanted to make.’”
Two years after “Scooby-Doo” the gang got back together in 2004 for “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.”
While on the podcast, the Emmy winner told host Evan Ross Katz a “little known fact” about filming the first flick.
“I shot ‘Scooby-Doo’ one at the same time as I was shooting ‘Buffy.’ They were both Warners,” Gellar recalled. “‘Buffy’ shot in LA and ‘Scooby’ shot in Australia. So I flew every two weeks back and forth from Australia.”
“So Season 5, I came back and shot Buffy’s big death but I was shooting that whole sequence while traveling back and forth from Australia,” she added.
Gellar starred on “Buffy” for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003. During her time on the series, she married Prinze, 49, in 2002. The couple shares daughter, Charlotte, 16, and son Rocky, 13.
During her sit-down, Gellar also touched on why, at one point, she “took a lot of years off” from acting.
In 2013, the New York native starred in the CBS sitcom “Crazy Ones” alongside Robin Williams. The pair played father-daughter duo Sydney and Simon Roberts, respectively, for one season.
Then, in 2014, the “Mrs. Doubtfire” actor died by suicide at age 63.
“I started ‘Crazy Ones’ when my son was three months old,” Gellar reflected. “I mean, I was breastfeeding the entire time and then Robin passed away and everything just sort of hit me. It was like the postpartum hit me. And that loss was so huge and I felt a little directionless for the first time in my life.”
She added, “And I thought maybe that’s my sign that like I’m not living in the moment enough because they can go away so quickly. And at that point, I just said I needed to take a break.”
Looking back, Gellar knows she made the right decision.
“I’m so glad I did on so many levels. I’ll never get that time back with my kids,” she gushed. “I didn’t miss a show, a performance, a first step, a lost tooth. Like, there was every moment I was able to be there for, and that’s not something you can do as a working actor. Our days are long. We travel a lot.”
These days, Gellar is “ready to work now that my kids are older.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
