“She’s All That” isn’t often considered one of the best romantic comedies of all time, but it’s an entertaining comedy that many of us who grew up in the ’90s remember fondly. Inspired by “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw, the film directed by Robert Iscove tells the story of Zachary (Freddie Prinze Jr.), an athlete who accepts a bet to transform Laney (Rachael Leigh Cook), the most socially maligned student in high school, into a beauty queen. What some people don’t remember, however, is that “She’s All That” features a dialogue-free cameo from Sarah Michelle Gellar. But why didn’t a star of his magnitude play a bigger role?
The answer is simple: Gellar didn’t want a speaking role in the romantic comedy, even though she was a pop culture phenomenon for playing the title character in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” at the time it premiered. Chatting with Cosmopolitan, Iscove revealed that Gellar was working on pickup plans for “Buffy” when the cameo happened, and that her friendship with a certain star factored into her planned visit that day.
“She was there to visit Freddie and we asked her if she would come do it, and she said she would come do it, but she didn’t want to talk. She didn’t say anything. OK, we don’t know why you wouldn’t say ‘Thank you’ or ‘No’. But it was her thing and she did it. And having Buffy in the movie was certainly [a big deal] – because at that point, ‘Buffy’ was huge.”
Now that Gellar and Prinze Jr. are married, some people think his involvement in “She’s All That” comes from the fact that they were all loved up at the time. However, the actor who plays Zachary in the film has a different memory of the events.
Freddie Prinze Jr. offered Sarah Michelle Gellar a role on She’s All That
If you ask Freddie Prinze Jr. about that experience, he’ll tell you that filming “She’s All That” coincided with the end of his relationship with Sarah Michelle Gellar. The actor says he and Gellar were friends during the “She’s All That” days, having met in the 1997 slasher “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Robert Iscove, meanwhile, believes that Prinze Jr. and the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” star were already a subject when the film went into production — and if they weren’t, the timeline was close enough to the start of their relationship.
Regardless of whose account is correct, Prinze Jr. was instrumental in getting his future wife involved in the project. Speaking to HuffPost, Iscove recalled how his involvement in “She’s All That” came about — and how he was more than happy to have her on board. In his own words:
“Freddie was also starting to date Sarah Michelle Gellar, and he said, ‘Would you mind if Sarah came over and made an appearance? She doesn’t want to talk, but…’ And I said, ‘Bring her in! We’ll put her in the cafeteria.’ And it wasn’t lawyers saying, “Oh, she’s in this ‘Buffy’ show, and can you afford her?” It was: ‘She’s here, she wants to do it.'”
It may have been a small role in the grand scheme of things, but at least Gellar got to be part of a “She’s All That” to some extent. Unfortunately, she’s nowhere to be found in Netflix’s 2021 “He’s All That” remake, but fans can expect to see Gellar resurrect her most iconic ’90s character in the upcoming “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reboot.
