Sarah Michelle Gellar arrives with her driver in a bright red pickup truck that's hauling diesel fuel. "Hi, I'm Sarah," she says somewhat unnecessarily, big grin, hopping out of the passenger side, shaking my hand. "Don't I arrive in style?"

Suprisingly, she's just five-three and (taking into consideration the weight of her all-black ensemble of sweater, plastic jeans, high-heel boots, leather bag) only 100 pounds, give or take. But she impacts. She is fully present. Everything about her today is striking and impossibly shiny: teeth, blonded hair, green eyes, pewter nail polish, not to mention a multitude of precious stones festooning her upper body: two diamond-encrusted earrings on one side, three on the other, a sparkly piece of ice hanging around her neck. Buffy never looked this good.

It's 2:15 on a warm Monday afternoon in January and we're outside L.A. Farm, a busy restaurant in a blah section of West Los Angeles. Gellar, on special lunch leave, has come from the set where she toils day and night decking demons and goring ghouls as the titular star, "the chosen one," of the enormously popular and insanely well-reviewed WB grrrl-power horrorcom, 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.' Although the studio - a former warehouse rented by The WB - is within walking distance, her bosses insisted she be chauffered here - even if it had to be in the first available fuel truck. "If I walk they'll yell at me," she explains as we enter into the hubbub of L.A. Farm's grazing customers. "It's a whole thing about the middle of the day. I'm not supposed to drive in the middle of the day, either, because if I, like, die or hurt somebody, it's on them." By that, she means the onus is on them, not a round of drinks - the death of Buffy would not be cause for celebration. She keeps talking while we try in vain to find a table in a quiet nook. "To get me here today," she says, "they had to figure out how to coincide two units and this lunch. So they asked me very nicely if I would do a forced call. As an actor, you're supposed to get 12 hours of turnaround - the amount of time you get from when you leave to when you come back the next day. But they can do what's called a 'forced call,' which is when they force you to come in early. And you can say no, which I normally do because I like my sleep. But I said yes and came in early and then had to wait an hour and a half because I got ready too quickly." (Twenty-five minutes in the makeup chair, total.)

Gellar can talk buisness like nobody's business. She goes on and on in long, convoluted, crisply enunciated sentences, revealing everything in the kind of detail that causes a reporter to glance furtively at his tape recorder with foreboding, prematurely dreading the transcribing process. Like when I ask her what she's shooting today: "This morning I did a scene from episode 15 that we hadn't done yet. When I get back, I'm gonna shoot a scence from episode 13, because episode 13 was short and there wasn't enough Buffy so they added some more scenes for me. Then at night I'm gonna go outside and shoot some scenes from episode 14 that we didn't finish. And at the same time they have another unit doing episode 15." Never mind that all I really wanted to know was what the episode was about.

Of course, all episodes of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' - created by Joss Whedon, who based the series on his screenplay for 1992 movie - are about vampires creating havoc in and around Sunnydale High School in fictional Sunnydale, California, with plenty of martial arts, witchcraft, and parental interference. (Whedon's good at havoc - he also penned the film 'Alien Resurrection' and co-wrote the mayhem in 'Toy Story.') It's a fait accompli that every week Buffy and her buds will, while engaging in Whedon's snappy, sarcastic bons mots and obliquely sexual ripostes, plunge pointed sticks into, cast spells on, and come to blows with legions of undead abominations, thus keeping the town safe until the next episode. (Buffy even has a brooding 300-year-old boyfriend.) Frankly, though, I don't get why Sunnydale, specifically, is so rife with vampires. We didn't have them when I went to high school. Did I miss something?

Apparently, yes - the first season. So Gellar explains it all.

"Sunnydale, very conveniently, happens to be located on a hellmouth. A hellmouth is a portal, a gate that links the underworld to our world. Evil creatures gravitate toward it, and every once in a while things come out of it. If ever the apocalypse came, the earth would open up and all the hellmouth creatures would come out. At the end of the first season the hellmouth opened and we closed it." Oh.

Gellar seems to be in an exceptional mood today. Maybe she's always like this - effusive, polished, quick, vivacious, professional, funny - I don't know. It's like she's speeding. She punctuates awful jokes (mine) with "Ba-dum-bum!" and frequently selects from her compendium of personal theories to make sweeping generalizations like, "I have this theory that nobody who lives in L.A. actually grew up here." "You'd never know it from the way I talk," she says later, out of nowhere, forking into her tuna tartare, "but I'm not a coffee drinker."

Are you addicted to anything?

Vanilla ice-blends from Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. I have one a day, in the morning.

You don't drink?

I do but not, like, obsessively. I'm not going to AA.

What was your worst hangover?

Oh, there are too many to name. I grew up in New York City. Hangovers there aer very different from hangovers in California. In New York City there's no bartender to remind you that you have to drive home. Mind you, I haven't had that many hangovers because I'm only 21. (Smiles slyly)

What the girl-on-the-go carries in her bag: a Tiffany pen-and-pencil set, a gift from her manager after she hosted 'Saturday Night Live;' two bottles of the roll-on perfume Smell This; keys; a toothbrush; mascara; a fat wallet; a skinny cell phone; a Wizard organizer; sunglasses; reading glasses; antibacterial gel "to wash to my hands with before I eat"; Clarins handcream "that I love"; vitamins; an inhaler for "certain excersise-induced asthma"; a Monopoly-print checkbook; makeup; and Mace. Pointedly, no pointed sticks.

Do you have stalkers?

"Well, I'm big in the prison system. Let me tell you, inmates love the Buffster."

They probably love the Buffy bra-strap game, doing shots whenever your bra shows. Do you play that up?

"No. In fact, this year I've been wearing a strapless bra - I'm wearing one now, just so you know - becasue I was so self-conscious and everyone made fun of me."

Sarah Michelle Gellar was born on April 14, 1977, in Manhattan, and grew up an only child on the Upper East Side with her mother, Rosellen, and, we can only assume, her father. "My father is not in the picture," Gellar says as breezily as if she were complimenting me on my shoes. "I like to believe that I was an immaculate conception but, unfortunately, my mother says no." When I press further, as is my wont, she stops me, albeit politely. She's been through this interrogation before. "He's no part of my life, so there's no point in talking about him. I just don't think there's any reason to give him credit for anything; I am who I am because of my mother." Is he considered a bad word at home? "He's not mentioned."

Gellar's parents, she'll allow, were divorced when she was seven or so. "I'm very tight-lipped about my family and my private life. I believe that one of the only ways for me to be a normal person is to have a life that's completely seperate from my job. When I go home at night I'm Sarah. The outside world doesn't know what the inside of my house looks like or who my current boyfriend is. Some actors like to share that; for me, it's my sanity."

So, do you have a boyfriend?

"I am single. I mean, I date, but no one serious-permanent right now."

Do you want to get married and have kids eventually?

"I want children. One of my best friends has this theory that we should be able to rent babies. The other day she was so depressed and thinking, You know, if I just had a baby for a couple of hours." (And I'm thinking: Gee, even her girlfriends have theories.)

When Gellar was four and still part of the outside world she was discovered by an agent as she was sitting in an uptown Manhattan restaurant watching five-year-olds singing in a talent showcase. Next thing she knew, she was in 'An Invasion of Privacy,' a very discreet movie-of-the-week about rape, starring Valerie Harper, Jerry Orbach, and Carol Kane. The came the infamous Burger King television campaign in which the winsome five-year-old Gellar complained convincingly about the meager size of a competitor's patties and ended up being hauled into court - along with Burger King and its ad agency, J. Walter Thompson - by a litigious McDonald's. It was eventually settled out of court and all Gellar remembers of the brouhaha "is that one of my friends had a birthday party at McDonald's and because of the 'truth in advertising' thing I didn't think I was allowed to eat there. So I put on a hat and sunglasses and only had a soda."

Ironically, McDonald's is now a Buffy advertiser.

Lest one get the wrong impression, Gellar insists that Rosellen was never, and is not presently, a stage mother. (A nursery-school teacher, Rosellen now lives in Los Angeles.) "The rule is that a parent is allowed to be within sight and sound of the child actor. My mom was so far behind the camera that I was lucky if I could see her at all! If at any time I didn't wanna work anymore, I could just tell my mom and I could stop."

No way Gellar wanted to stop. She'd found her calling. "But school always came first," she says. "If my grades ever dropped to an A-minus I wasn't allowed to work." She attended private school, Columbia Prep, in New York, her earnings paying her tuition. While in eighth grade, she appeared in the three-part miniseries 'A Woman Named Jackie,' starring Roma Downey as Mrs. Onassis. She went to Children's Professional School for a while but "hated it, hated it, hated it," and switched ti what most alumni call "the 'Fame' school," New York's LaGaurdia High School for Performing Arts, skipping her junior yearand graduation with a "97-point-something average" at 16. Gellar did not go to college, despite her grades and income, because she already had a busy career, thank you. She'd appeard steadily in theater, films, and television, including 'Jake's Women,' "the only Neil Simon play to close out of town"; the 1988 movie 'Funny Farm'; and most famously as bitchy Kendall Hart, Erica Kane's illegitimate 18-year-old daughter on the ABC soap 'All My Children.' Well, maybe not so much bitchy as misunderstood. "I tried to seduce Dimitri," she remembers, "and when he turned me down I slept with the stable boy and told Erica he raped me, and she went and stabbed Dimitri in a delirium, thinking he was my rapist father, and Erica went to court and I lied on the witness stand, but I eventually confessed and wound up going to jail. And that was just one week!"

FUN FACTS: Gellar still watches 'All My Children,' sometimes, in her trailer. She drives a red Range Rover, just so she "can say red Rover, red Rover." She collects platinum and diamonds and antique books, is fully informed on a variety of first editions, has her eye on a $25,000 Shakespere folio, and hangers out for hours at the Heritage Book Shop on Melrose Avenue. Her first big crush, when she was nine, was on Eric Stoltz.

Are you a feminist?

"No, I'm not. I hate the word 'feminist.' It has a bad connotation of women who don't shave their legs or under their arms."

Then what's your stand on girl power?

"I perfer girl power of feminism, because girl power still has an ounce of femininity to it. There's no femininity in feminism, which is really weird because it's technically the same word."

What do you fear most?

"My fears are most people's fears - and then some. When you wind up in the spotlight your life can change overnight. So sometimes I'm fearful of my life changing too much. I'm fearful that I might never work again."

Do you have the fear that one day people will figure out that you have no talent?

"Oh! Yeah! All the time!"

Last year, Gellar made a double cinematic splash - make that splatter - co-starring with Hollywood's new generation in the box-office hits, 'Scream 2' and 'I Know What You Did Last Summer,' earning herself a Blockbuster Award for breakthrough performance and a Blockbuster Award for best supporting actress for the latter. In February, Gellar hit the big screen again in 'Simply Irresistible,' a film that takes her from slaying to sauteing ("bad-da-bum"). In the magical romantic comedy, Gellar plays a chef who quite literally adds love to everything she cooks. But this month, in 'Cruel Intentions,' Gellar has found the best role of her young life so far, a role that seems tailor-made for her particular, ahem, charms. The aptly titled vehicle is writer-director Roger Kumble's deliciously evil, complex comedy of ill manners, an impossible to synopsize update of 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses - with sexual shenanigans galore. It also stars Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair, Joshua Jackson, and Eric Mabius. Gellar's performance is worthy of Bette or Joan at their most conniving. "I cannot wait for it to come out," says Gellar. "I read the script and told everyone, 'This is the movie I'm gonna do.' My manager of 12 years thought I was gonna fire her if she told me not to do it. I was determined."

Determined. That pretty much sums up our young actress.

When the check comes, Gellar notices me pause over the math on the credit-card receipt. "Double the tax," she whispers. The she pulls the cell phone out of her bag and calls the warehouse. Soon, a dark-blue truck (this time) pulls up outside L.A. Farm, and Gellar is whisked back to her job saving the world from evil. God bless her.

Source: Detour

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