Sarah Michelle Gellar has spoken about working on an “extremely toxic male set” early in her career, a seemingly pointed dig at her time on Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Gellar spoke on a panel at TheWrap’s Power of Women Summit in Los Angeles earlier this week. While she didn’t specifically name drop the show or its creator Joss Whedon, her comments were pretty striking.
“For so long, I was on a set that I think was known for being an extremely toxic male set,” she said.
She explained the experience had negatively shaped her understanding of what being on-set was supposed to be like.
“And so that was ingrained in my head, that that was what all sets were like, and that women were pitted against each other — that is women became friends, then we became too powerful, so you had to keep that down,” she said.
Gellar also touched on how her experiences changed over the course of her career.
“And now that I’ve had this opportunity to work with so many more women and men that support women as well, I realised how easy an experience it can be.
“But… unfortunately we’re still in that place where all of those departments a lot of times need to be women for us to have a voice.”
Sarah Michelle Gellar has previously touched on her time working with Whedon. She shared a message when her co-star Charisma Carpenter tweeted a lengthy statement in 2021 about her time on Buffy and spin-off Angel.
Carpenter alleged Joss Whedon “abused his power on numerous occasions while working together on the sets of [both shows]”. She also accused him of creating “hostile and toxic work environments”.
For her part, Gellar posted on Instagram that while she was “proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summer, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon”.
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Charisma Carpenter also received support from fellow Buffy stars including Amber Benson, Michelle Tratchenberg and David Boreanaz.
Carpenter shared her statement after Justice League star Ray Fisher alleged in 2020 that Whedon’s treatment of the film’s cast and crew was “gross, abusive, unprofessional and completely unacceptable“. Those claims led Warner Brothers to investigate Wheadon’s on-set behaviour.
For his part, Whedon was the subject of a lengthy Vulture profile in January of this year where he denied a number of the Justice League and Buffy allegations.
“I yelled, and sometimes you had to yell,” he said about the Buffy set.
“This was a very young cast and it was easy for everything to turn into a cocktail party.”
Other than her 2021 statement, Gellar has rarely spoken about the Buffy allegations.
In a New York Times article from September 2022, Gellar was asked if she had “generally good experiences” in the industry as a teen and young woman.
“No. It was really hard. There weren’t great female roles when I came up,” she said.
“That’s why Buffy was so spectacular, because she really had something to do, and then we had [I Know What You Did Last Summer] where it was the women figuring things out. That was all a new turn of events.
“That was on the script side of it. And then there’s the other side of being a young girl in the business.”
Gellar added that she doesn’t “win by telling my stories, emotionally, for me”.
“I look at people that tell their stories, and I’m so impressed. But in this world where people get torn apart, and victim blaming and shaming, I just keep my stories in here.”
And from the way Hollywood, the media and the public treat women they disagree with? That’s incredibly fkn understandable.
