“She says to me, ‘That’s unfair. You were a child actor,'” Gellar explained. “Yes, I was. But I was not the child of two famous parents.”
Despite her own history as a child star and now three decades in the spotlight, Sarah Michelle Gellar has some strict rules in place about letting her own children pursue a career in show business. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gellar opened up about her reservations about letting her kids chase fame—and the very good reasons she has for not letting them act just yet.
After sharing that her 13-year-old daughter, Charlotte, has shown an interest in acting, Gellar added, “Does it scare the sh*t out of me? Well, we have rules in place. She can’t be in front of a camera until she graduates high school.”
Gellar, who shares Charlotte and a 10-year-old son, Rocky James, with her husband Freddie Prinze Jr., said that Charlotte isn’t exactly thrilled with that rule.
“She says to me, ‘That’s unfair. You were a child actor,'” Gellar explained. “Yes, I was. But I was not the child of two famous parents.”
Gellar isn’t stopping Charlotte from pursuing acting altogether, but wants the teen to have plenty of time to grow and learn about the world before she decides on a career.
“I’ll never stop her from being on a set,” she said. “But she’s just not going on camera while she’s living under our roof. There’ll be different expectations for her, so she needs to learn everything there is first.”
The interview also revealed that Gellar and Prinze Jr. have revived their acting careers in recent years, in part to give Charlotte more opportunities to learn and see how to go about having a stable career in show business.
“From my vantage point, Sarah always had the hunger to go back to acting,” Prinze Jr. told the magazine. “I could tell from the way she watches TV, analyzing it, and how she talks about movies on the drive home [from the theater]. Once our daughter started taking it seriously, both of us just instinctually wanted to show her the way we think it should be done.”
With those kinds of role models leading the way, there’s no doubt Charlotte will be set up for success—no matter what she chooses.
