“Just a bad choice”: the movie Sarah Michelle Gellar wants to delete from history
Sarah Michelle Gellar has a long history outside of Sunnydale, even though most of her fans would be content if she never did anything other than Buffy.
As a big-screen scream queen, she’s played her part in establishing franchises like Scream, The Grudge, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, won a Daytime Emmy for her work on All My Children, and, most importantly, she played Daphne Blake in the live-action Scooby-Doo films, and those movies slap.
Unfortunately, for every success Gellar has enjoyed, there have been setbacks, with the star having a fair share of stinkers to her name. She appeared in Southland Tales, the sophomore picture of Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly that split critics right down the middle. She lent her voice to Happily N’Ever After, widely regarded as one of the worst animated movies ever made, and regretfully made a cameo in the 2025 reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer, which, let’s just say, wasn’t as good as the original.
According to Gellar herself, who recently expressed regret that a planned Buffy reboot had been cancelled, one bad movie continues to haunt her to this day.
“Simply Irresistible was just a bad choice,” she said (via IMDB), “For that, it was a great learning experience. I wasn’t ready to make that movie. I was too young. The script was not ready. I knew in my heart before I left to make it that I should back out.”
Released in 1999, Simply Irresistible is a romantic comedy with a unique twist, which sees Gellar play Amanda, a woman who has inherited her mother’s struggling restaurant upon her death, and after learning she is the worst cook of all time, receives help from…a magical crab, yep. The enchanted crustacean not only improves the fortunes of her business but also leads her to Tom, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, who quickly becomes her love interest.
Originally, scriptwriter Judith Roberts envisioned Amanda as an older woman, with Holly Hunter and Sarah Jessica Parker initially shortlisted for the lead role, but 20th Century Fox wanted somebody younger, and as Buffy was already a Fox property also doing incredibly well at the time, Gellar was chosen instead, who was just 22 years old when the movie came out.
Simply Irresistible proved to be the exact opposite among critics, with the story criticised for being bland and obvious, while the zanier elements were dismissed as attention-grabbing gimmicks. To make matters worse, it made just $4.4million from a $6.6m budget, going against the studio’s logic that Gellar was a big draw and damaged the young actor as a movie headliner. She was able to bounce back with, you guessed it, Scooby-Doo; is there nothing those films can’t do?
While Simply Irresistible might not have been the star-making performance she may have wanted, Gellar has at least been able to reflect on the experience and take lessons from it, which is never to trust a crab again.
