Sarah Michelle Gellar has opened up about the recent cancellation of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot.
Having risen to fame as the demon hunting high schooler in the show from 1997 to 2003, she was set to return to the role in a reboot, titled Buffy: New Sunnydale, directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao for streaming service Hulu. Unfortunately for fans of the show, the streamer declined to develop the series beyond a pilot.
Gellar broke the news recently on social media, and spoke to People about how she received the call that the series wasn’t going ahead while promoting her new film Ready Or Not 2. “I was just about to take the stage in front of all the fans,” she recalled. “Hulu had decided not to move forward with the Buffy revival. Let me tell you, nobody saw this coming.”
Looking back on the experience, she said she had been reluctant to return to the role for over 20 years, until Zhao impressed her with her passion and vision for the world. “I’ve been asked since the day I left to return to Sunnydale,” she said. “And it never occurred to me that it was something I was going to do.”
“Then four years ago, Chloé, the witch that she is — and I say that as a good thing — comes into my life. In one meeting, she makes me say ‘yes’ to something I never saw on my radar” she continued. “That was because of the deep love and commitment and passion she had for this character. It was like I was stepping back in time.”
The pair shot a pilot episode for the proposed series, which would have seen Buffy return and introduced a new slayer (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) as her co-star. “Chloé and I talked a lot,” she said. “The dialogue flew off the tongue. When I was on set, it was craziness. It was like, ‘Oh, we’re here. We’re doing this.’ I loved the duality that we had this new, younger slayer who was where Buffy was when the show started, and then we would pick up with where Buffy was now.”
As to why the show was cancelled, she pointed to one unnamed figure who seemed against the project. “We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him,” she said.
“That’s very hard when you’re taking a property that is as beloved as Buffy, not just to the world, but to me and Chloé. So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn’t watch it.”
Sources told People that Hulu’s parent company, Disney, own the IP for the show, making it unlikely that the series will find a new home.
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