Sarah Michelle Gellar

On set with Sarah Michelle Gellar. High-school babe kicks Vampire ass with help from Gold Blend guy - it doesn’t look like the formula for a great TV show. But it is...

Sarah Michelle Gellar is having one of her all-but-nonexistent moments off from filming the final several episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starring as the eponymous heroine. She is sitting in a director’s chair beside the monitors, dressed, as Buffy, in a white sheer top over a black tank and pants.

Gellar, 23, who has played the role since the show debuted in 1997, has been on set since early this morning and will be here until late at night. She often says that the early assumption of adult responsibilities is something she shares with her character - a former child actress (she was discovered at age four), she has been a subject of public scrutiny since her actual high school years, when she was in the soap All My Children.

Whatever their source, as Buffy and in person, she has a beauty contestant’s smile and the hypervigilant manner of someone who doesn’t trust anyone who hasn’t earned it but nevertheless needs your vote. She has a physical charisma that in itself borders on a superpower. And at the moment, she also has a realistic looking, carefully applied cut across her forehead. She speaks very fast, and her rapid-fire delivery has served her well when negotiating the sentences of Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, which tend to be long and to contain many clauses. She is considering the question: what makes Buffy slay? "I think it comes more naturally to her than she’d like to admit," she says. "She says ’Ooh, I’m always having to do what’s right,’ and ’Ooh, it’s so hard,’ but really, that is her nature. The thing is, with this show you can identify with so many of the characters. You really take an interest in what’s happening to each and every one of them.

"And it’s all in Joss’s brain. It’s amazing to me that one day he had this thought and now he’s creating this empire, this entire lot. Like, in a couple of days we start shooting the last episode of the season, and no one has any idea what happens. But Joss keeps saying, ’Don’t worry, I have it right here.’"

Joss Whedon has always liked to create imaginary worlds. When he was 11 or 12, he had one featuring hero Harry Egg, itinerant space traveller, and his androgynous demigod sidekick, Mouseflesh. Ten or 13 years later, during which other stuff happened - school, writing spec scripts, a job on Roseanne - he had another idea. It was more like an image, actually. "It was pretty much the blonde in the alley in the horror movie who keeps getting killed, " he says, "I felt bad for her, but she was always more interesting than the other girls. She was fun, she had sex, she was vivacious. But then she would get punished for it. Literally, I just had that image, that scene, in my mind, like the trailer for a movie - what if the girl goes into the dark alley. And the monster follows her. And she destroys him."

And that is pretty much what happens on Buffy. After three years at Sunnydale High School, Buffy Summers has just completed her freshman year at UC Sunnydale. She is a vampire slayer. Every generation has a slayer whose burden it is to fight evil - primarily, but not exclusively, in the form of vampires. Sunnydale is the centre of an extra helping of evil, because it is situated on a Hell mouth that, if opened, would end the world as we know it. Complications have ensued.

In the real world, Whedon, 36, is sitting in his office in a building on the studio lot in Santa Monica where much of Buffy, currently concluding it’s fourth season, is shot. He is wearing jeans, trainers, a corduroy jeans jacket and a blue-and-white striped shirt, an ensemble that makes him look sort of like a hip-hop Dennis the Menace. Whedon grew up in Manhattan and went to boarding school in England before following his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps to become a TV writer. He was not a happy adolescent. "I was one of those kids who no one pays attention to, so he makes a lot of noise and is wacky," he says, "But I was funny; I wasn’t totally annoying. I decided early on that my function in life was to walk into a group, say something funny and leave while they were still laughing. Which is pretty much what I did, only now I get paid for it." (And in the case of Toy Story, which he co-wrote, Academy Award-nominated for it. Other credits include Alien:Resurrection, Speed, and the 1992 feature Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

When he speaks, he tends to look off into the middle distance, as one whose habitual eloquence doesn’t make him any less habitually shy. He also wears a slightly pained expression, maybe because he still hasn’t written the last episode of the season; maybe because he bears the weight of imaginary worlds on his shoulders; but probably because he had an emergency appendectomy earlier in the week.

"Then I wrote my little movie," he continues, "which was sort of fun. And then they made my little movie which was sort of less fun but had a very small fun degree. And then this, which wasn’t my idea. After the movie, a TV production executive said, ’This is a TV show,’ so I thought, ’Well, a TV show needs something that will sustain it, and a Californian girl fighting vampires, that’s not enough. So I thought about high school as hell and about the things the girl fights as reflections of what you go through in high school. And I thought, ’Well, that’s a TV series.’"

But just barely. "You try being a mid-season replacement show on the WB (the Warner Brothers channel) called Buffy the Vampire Slayer and see how much respect you get," says Gellar. Ten or 13 episodes later, however, after character and story development of a depth and texture the show’s title did not suggest, it was a whole imaginary world. And, apart from The Simpsons, it was the coolest show on US television; in fact, it was cool for some of the same reasons - it was writer driven; and it was of a genre so fundamentally silly that it could get away with murder. "You can get to the emotional truth of things almost by sleight of hand, while people aren’t really looking," says supervising producer Marti Noxon. "It’s sort of like,’ Here, look at the shiny vampire,’ and behind that, there’s something really raw going on."

And, often, there is. When people’s feeling get hurt on Buffy, instead of the usual resolution in the last act of the episode, it resonates over whole seasons. Buffy is one of the most sexually blunt shows on the air in the US, almost subversively so. You have only to look at the parallel suggested by the imagery of Sunnydale, the fictional town where the show takes place, being situated on a Hell mouth, a portal that has to remain sealed to avoid dire, world-changing results, to see that it’s not a show that takes the consequences of sexual activity lightly. "It’s something we deal with," says Whedon. "Because it’s something that’s on peoples minds. But on a horror show, if you do something - anything - you are going to be punished for it. I’m not out to say it’s bad. And I’m not out to say, ’Everybody go have sex now.’ The fact is, people do have sex, and sometimes it gets complicated, and that’s what we want to get at."

Anyway, the characters, most of whom graduated from high school last season, have sex, and some of them a lot, and that’s not even the subversive part. The subversive part, especially in the show’s depiction of female sexuality, is that the characters have sex with consequences, but are not defined by that alone. They also have friendships with consequences, school with consequences, popularity with consequences.

The four actors who have formed the nucleus of the cast since the first season - Gellar, Alyson Hannigan (Willow), Nicholas Brendon (Xander Harris), and Anthony Stewart Head (Rupert Giles) - are gathered on the set of Giles’s apartment, rehearsing a scene in which they discuss their plan for confronting Adam, a demonoid (an android that’s demon rather than human in basis).

Gellar, her blonde hair styled into "Ray of Light" Madonna curls, is sitting on the floor whittling a stake. She wants to know if the huge medicine bag full of weapons at her feet is the bag she will now have to carry for the rest of the episode ("I was hoping for Prada"). Hannigan, the only cast member in the clothes she will wear for the actual scene - a pink and white baseball shirt with a kitty cat on it and grey jeans - sits on the couch bouncing a small rubber ball up and down her arms. Brendon, who is wearing an oversize blue sweater and baggy pants, is having minor trouble with his lines. Like much Buffy dialogue, they conflate exposition and wisecrack. He changes a joke about why she should regret taking French instead of Sumerian. "Spanish," says Gellar, as he continues his speech. "No, it’s French now," he explains, "because you already established that you spoke French." "Ooh, watches the show!" says Gellar, mock impressed.

Buffy, which by its very nature involves a lot of stunt work, visual effects, make-up and difficult dialogue, is a complicated show to execute. The cast has developed a policy, not always supported by Whedon, that the first person having a line including something like, say, the Sisterhood of Zhe, gets to decide pronunciation. But they appear as weary as you would expect them to be when shooting episode 21 of 22 in a week when the boss, who is not known for delivering scripts early, has had emergency surgery.

Like the sources Whedon draws on when creating the imaginary vistas of Sunnydale, the actors’ origins are far-flung. Hannigan, like Gellar a child actor, has the same smarter-than-she-thinks-she-is, goofy-sexy charm of her character. Brendon, who grew up intending to play pro baseball, had done only a line or two as an extra on sitcoms before landing his role on Buffy. And Head, who was previously best known for his part as the guy in the Gold Blend adverts, has a resume that encompasses everything from stage work in London to, well, Gold Blend adverts.

After the scene in which the plan for foiling Adam is devised, Gellar departs to study lines for her next scene, with Marc Blucas, who plays her new boyfriend, Riley Finn, a UC Sunnydale student who is also a demon-fighting commando with an underground paramilitary organisation called the Initiative. )Buffy’s old romantic interest, the soulful, good-guy vampire Angel had to move to LA so that he could have a more normal life and he could have his own show.) That Blucas, as Riley, has carved out a place in Buffyworld is a tribute to his own charm, which has a polished quality similar to Gellar’s one-two punch of guardedness and gleam.

"For me, the show is about a young woman finding herself," says James Marsters, who plays the punk-rock, currently vampirically impotent Spike, of Buffy’s subtext. Others also made this point, but I just wanted to mention Marsters because he is so incredibly good and I don’t have room for him anywhere else. Respect is also due to the impeccable comic timing of Emma Caulfield as Xander’s love interest, the 1,100-year-old former vengeance demon Anya; and the tentative, centred appeal of Amber Benson as Willow’s love interest, Tara.

For all that these love match-ups are often played fir comic effect, they are at least as often played, as Whedon notes, in almost embarrassingly deadly earnest. Most often, it’s both. In fact, although the show may never win a Golden Globe, when it comes to dealing with what’s inside you that you can’t control, Buffy is the most realistic show on the air, and Buffy, who spends most of an upcoming episode having unusually sweaty sex for prime time, is one of its best role models. "She’s driven by her emotions, and she doesn’t always make the right decisions," says producer Marti Noxon. "But she totally believes in herself and her own abilities, when it gets right down to it. And I never had that when I was growing up. There’s a lot of Buffy’s empowerment that’s about learning to deal with sexuality - that if you open up to something, it will probably make you stronger, but it’s going to hurt. Other shows that deal with the real pain of living can put people off, because that’s all they’re dealing with on the very surface of things."

"I definitely think that a woman kicking ass is extraordinarily sexy," says Whedon. "If I wasn’t compelled on a very base level by that archetype, I wouldn’t have created that character. I mean, yes, I have a feminist agenda, but it’s not like I made a chart."

So what makes Buffy slay? "Basically, a sense of responsibility," says Whedon, "and a need to deal with her excess energy. It’s just in her blood. Basically, high school is all about alienation and horror, and I was very unhappy in high school all the time, so it was the great well from which I draw. I think a few people were happy in high school, and I revile them, although I married one. And it didn’t start getting easier in college, for me anyway. It isn’t like, ’Well, high school’s over, problem solved.’ People never really get over it or they wouldn’t respond to the show the way they do."

"That’s the whole point of the show," agrees Gellar later in another of her-all-but-nonexistent spare moments, when asked if Buffy has developed trust issues from the fact that she trusts the wrong person, the world comes to an end. "When someone breaks your heart, it feels like the world is ending. And in Buffy’s case, that’s true. But everyone feels that. And that’s the point."