NEED TO KNOW
Before she was Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar was Kendall Hart.
Veteran casting director Judy Blye Wilson opened up about her time working on All My Children in a new interview published by TV Insider on Oct. 16. Gellar, now 48, was 15 at the time when Wilson needed to cast someone as Kendall, the daughter of Susan Lucci’s Erica Kane.
“She was a young kid, and she had done a couple of little plays,” Wilson said of Gellar. “We tested about four girls, and we tested them with Susan. And there was no question about it. Sarah Michelle was it, period. She really, really nailed that role and continued to do so. She was really phenomenal.”
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Kendall was supposed to be a younger version of Erica, serving back to her mother the chaos that she had sent in the direction of so many other people. “That relationship was interesting between her and Susan, and they had great chemistry together,” Wilson said. “And obviously, Sarah Michelle went on to do Buffy [the Vampire Slayer].”
Gellar won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series in 1995, after her second nomination. She left AMC in 1995, and the character returned in 2002, played by Alicia Minshew. Gellar, meanwhile, started starring in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997, and soon became a star thanks to that show and movies like 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2, 1999’s Cruel Intentions and 2002’s Scooby-Doo.
Wilson’s time as casting director at AMC saw her unearth some other future superstars, including Michael B. Jordan, Chadwick Boseman, Josh Duhamel and Amanda Seyfried.
She also found one more Buffy star — Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Lily Montgomery. “The interesting thing about it is that Michelle Trachtenberg came on to All My Children when she was 14, and then I’ll be darned if she didn’t end up doing Buffy with Sarah, which I thought was pretty amazing,” Wilson told TV Insider. Trachtenberg, who died in February at age 39, played Buffy’s sister Dawn. “They were big buddies and played in Buffy for a number of years.”
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Before her days at AMC, Wilson worked as a casting assistant on Ryan’s Hope. Post-AMC, she landed at The Young and the Restless. “I really loved working there,” she said of the CBS drama.
On Oct. 17, Wilson was honored at the Daytime Emmys as part of the “Silver Circle,” a “society of honor” that recognizes her career of more than 25 years in television. “I’m absolutely over the moon,” she told TV Insider. “It makes me feel validated, like I got it right. I take no credit for it; the actor and their talent are what’s winning here.”
She explained of her penchant for finding future stars, “But it was a plethora of fabulous people coming along in those years, and I think that I was lucky enough to snag some of them when they were very young. I really believe it was just great timing all the way around.”
Back in 1994, Gellar spoke to PEOPLE about her role on All My Children, where she ended up playing age 24 even though she was 17. After a day bringing Kendall’s schemes to life, she said “It takes me an hour to unwind. But it’s a great way to get out all my frustrations.”
She said that her first day at work, she was “shaking” until her costar Lucci, 78, calmed her down. “Susan put her arm around me and said, ‘Don’t worry, nobody bites,’ ” she remembered.
