With cameras flashing, Emmy award-winning actress Sarah Michelle Gellar sashayed into a grand suite of the Paris' Hôtel Intercontinental to meet the French press. "Bonjour or hi as we like to say," she chirped, as she settled down on a plush couch and pulled her grey coat cheekily over her slim mini-skirted legs. Gellar was in Paris to promote her new movie, "Cruel Intentions" ("Sexe Intentions"), a modernized teen version of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," Choderlos de Laclos's 18th-century novel of steamy sexual conquests and twisted psychological mind games. In the movie, opening in France June 23, Gellar plays Kathryn Merteuil, a sugar-coated but perversely manipulative teenager who challenges her sexually-obsessed stepbrother Sebastian (played by Ryan Phillippe) to deflower the headmaster's proudly chaste daughter Annette during summer break from their snobby Upper East Side high school. If he succeeds, Kathryn tells him in the most blunt terms that he can enjoy her in any way he wants. But if he fails, he must hand over to her his most prized possession, his 1956 red Jaguar roadster. Furthermore, Kathryn wants to punish her ex-boyfriend for leaving her for the fawn-like Selma, acted ridiculously by Cecile Caldwell. Sebastian is thrilled by yet another sexual conspiracy, and accepts the bet. New York Times writer Rick Marin claimed that "Cruel Intentions" and other new teenage movies "fog" his glasses, and he dismissed the film as "casually raunchy." Entertainment Weekly called it "enjoyably trashy." Rolling Stone reported that the movie's first-time director Roger Kumble had "gone over the edge and the top" by setting this fourth film adaptation of the book in a vulgar high school setting. Nevertheless, despite some unfavorable reviews, the movie made back its $12 million budget in just one weekend. New York native Gellar appears in three new movies this year as a magical chef in "Simply Irresistible," as a girl in a cafeteria in "She's All That" and in "Cruel Intentions." But she is most known for fighting evil creatures in Warner Brothers' popular TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," when she confesses she can be a real wuss sometimes. After she freaked out during a night shoot in a graveyard, the producers were forced to build a fake cemetery outside the "Buffy" studio in Los Angeles. "It's really hard to be a vampire slayer if you are scared of cemeteries," the 22-year-old ingenue told Rolling Stone. Gellar was discovered by a talent agent in a Manhattan restaurant at the age of four and a few weeks later debuted as Valerie in the CBS-TV film "An Invasion of Privacy." While attending the Professional Children's School in Manhattan, 15-year-old Gellar landed a role as Kendall Hart in the ABC daytime drama "All My Children." Two years later, she won a daytime Emmy Award. Then she went to Hollywood. Since then, Gellar starred in "I Know What You Did Last Summer" as a small town beauty queen, and "Scream 2," where she gets stabbed and tossed off a balcony. In the spirit of her famous character Buffy, Gellar claimed: "I got the role as Kathryn in 'Cruel Intentions' because I stalked Roger Kumble." In fact, the perky blonde actress crashed a Halloween party Kumble was attending to show him how well she could play the scheming and seductive character. Ironically, the movie was later filmed in the same house. "The 'Cruel Intentions' script was the best I have ever read," she said, "because it is so rare to find scripts where young people are both intelligent and manipulative." Gellar, who has the Chinese character for integrity tattooed on her back, is a self-assured and independent young woman with big plans for the future. She wants to act in the 'Star Wars' prequels, perform nerd roles, create a name for herself in the theater and eventually produce movies. "I am probably greedy," she laughs, "but I want to do it all!" |
