Ray Richmond is contributing to Deadline’s coverage of TCA.

TCA: Sarah Michelle Gellar To Guest On Departing Soap ‘All My Children’
The last time Sarah Michelle Gellar attended a session at TCA, she was about to depart Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a network (UPN) that no longer exists. That was eight years ago. Now, Gellar is 34 and the mother of a toddler daughter as well as the star of the new CW drama hour Ringer, in which she stars as a woman impersonating her murdered identical twin sister. While she was away, Gellar said she did a lot of traveling, became a mom, and recharged her engine.

“I was very burnt out after Buffy,” Gellar admitted during a panel promoting Ringer. “It was exhausting. I was essentially 18 on the pilot and 24 and married by the time we finished, and I’d never had any time (to myself). I did the show and movies during weekends and hiatus time.” But during the intervening years while traveling, Gellar said, she began to watch a lot of TV “and I suddenly realized all of the amazing roles for women are on television. Also, once I had my daughter, I realized I was done with the nomadic lifestyle. I want to put my daughter to bed at night and be there for her first day of school. Nothing allows an actress to do that better than television.”

The role that Gellar returned for is a fascinatingly complex one, allowing her to portray essentially three characters: herself, her murdered twin sister, and herself pretending to be her murdered sister. “There’s so much more available today in terms of technologies that are available to you,” she said. “Yet what you find is that even with all of that technology, you want the heart of a scene, and that’s two people talking to each other.”

A critic was surprised to find out that, despite having been around so long, Gellar is still only in her mid-30s. “Did you expect me to be like 70?” she asked, incredulous. She added that she wouldn’t be doing as many of her own stunts in Ringer as she did in Buffy “due to my advanced age. We’re all a little worried about osteoporosis.”