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Sarah Michelle Gellar

Sarah Michelle Gellar is grudgingly back in the spotlight

Tuesday 24 October 2006, by Webmaster

A disturbingly normal Sarah Michelle Gellar is back on the A-list with a hot new horror film, Sal Morgan writes.

Shy ... Buffy made Sarah Michelle Gellar into an international star, but she still doesn’t like interviews.

"This really scares me," says Sarah Michelle Gellar. "The thought of talking about myself for days on end. It’s frightful!"

Gellar is laughing but insists she’s not kidding.

"Seriously, there has to be something more interesting to talk about than me."

At 29, Gellar has been a star for almost half her life. She’s been in dozens of movies, on hundreds of magazine covers and modelled for Maybelline. She’s been voted "sexy" and "beautiful" more times than you can imagine - but says none of this has helped her shyness, it’s just "made it worse".

"The more [interviews] I do, the worse I get," she says. "I think it would be better if you didn’t know what to expect."

Dressed in a black satin top, fitted jeans and over-the-knee brown boots, the down-to-earth petite actress says she was surprised when the director invited her back to star in the sequel to the 2004 horror flick The Grudge.

"When they called me and said they wanted me to be in the second one I said ’Didn’t I die?’. Evidently not. Apparently, I escaped. I thought I was a goner. That’s movie magic!"

Gellar’s The Grudge 2 role is much smaller than in the first film, but the sequel was not going to be made without her on board. Additionally, Gellar said she’d only do it if "it had a purpose".

"I didn’t want to come back just to come back," she explains. "The story had to make sense and stick to the original. That’s important with any kind of remake. You’ve got to be careful and you’ve got to get it right."

It seems they did. The Grudge 2 opened at No.1 last weekend in the US, taking in $US22 million ($29 million).

Gellar is an unlikely fan of Asian martial-arts movies and still jokes that she started stalking the American producers of The Grudge as soon as she heard that there was going to be a remake of the Japanese horror film Ju-On.

"I’ve always been fascinated by Asian culture, and I love that women can play the lead in a horror film. It used to be only on TV that women could lead, that a show could be based on a woman. In television, women rule. They can do whatever they want. In films they still have a long way to go. Why is it that women can’t open a comedy the same way a man can? Why can’t women open action movies the same way Bruce Willis can?

"There are still only certain film genres where a woman can stand out, be heroic, be the centrepiece."

Clearly, horror fans loved Gellar as the "centrepiece" of The Grudge: it made almost $US190 million at the global box office.