By SEAN DALY Special to the Daily Press
Freddie Prinze, Jr. was looking a lot like the All American boy-next-door for his May 20 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Wearing dark denim jeans, a tan leather sport coat, and wire rimmed glasses, the clean-cut New Mexican native seemed just about as wholesome as, well, Fred Jones, his chisel-jawwed, scarf-wearing alter ego in the new live action movie, “Scooby Doo.”
So who’d have guessed that Prinze, 26, could be so dangerous in bed? Certainly not Sarah Michelle Gellar, 25 — his “Scooby” co-star and fiancé since April, 2001 — who suffered a black eye last month when the 6’ 1” teen heart throb accidentally struck her in his sleep.
“I bruise so easily, you just have to touch me,” a fully recovered (but slightly embarrassed) Gellar laughed days later, while promoting the couple’s second on-screen collaboration. “So when you hit a little harder, you get a shiner... I still can’t believe he told that story!”
That’s because Gellar, best known as TV’s “Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” is famously tight-lipped when it comes to all matters personal.
“Celebrities give away too much information,” she has said. “I’m not interested in how so-and-so lost their virginity.” So pry her for details about the couple’s pending nuptials (rumored to be later this summer) and expect an answer something like this: “I think most of my true fans would want me to have the time to be able to enjoy that privately.” Adds Prinze, “Sarah and I work because we never talk about that stuff.”
It didn’t used to be that way. Two years ago, while promoting the box office stinker “Boys and Girls,” Prinze had no problems dishing up fun factoids — like how Gellar can eat him under the table, when presented with sushi, Italian and Chinese food. Or how he would “crush her” if the two ever came to blows.
“She’ll try to say that she could throw some kung fu moves on me,” he joked, as if to discount Gellar’s five years of Tae Kwon Do training and recent kickboxing lessons. “But I’d knock her out.”
Ah, young love. The reigning king and queen of teen Hollywood first hooked up in 1997 on the set of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” as Prinze was winding up a four-year relationship with General Hospital’s Kimberley McCullough.
As the pair grew closer, Gellar invited Prinze to accompany her to various movie premieres and social functions around Los Angeles, during breaks in her relationships with professional tennis player Jan-Michael Gambill and high school classmate, actor Jerry O’Connell.
“People didn’t even know we had been together for the longest time,” Prinze laughs, looking back. “They thought it was a new relationship.”
So did diners at a Malibu restaurant in early 2000, who spotted Gellar and Prinze giggling for hours over sake and salmon tartar, only weeks before it was officially PC to call them “a couple.”
According to reports, in 2001 he chose a restaurant on the Gold Coast of Australia — not far from the “Scooby Doo” set — to present his brown-eyed sweetie with a custom-made diamond engagement ring, designed by Cathy Waterman. (She’s done monster-sized rocks for Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow and Meg Ryan.) The formal announcement came at Gellar’s 24th birthday party a few days later.
But there was one small problem for the still-beaming lovebirds — Gellar had “Buffy” commitments back in Los Angeles, while Prinze was required to remain Down Under to work on the movie.
“Freddie always wanted to fly home to hang out with Sarah, but I wouldn’t let him,” says pal Matthew Lillard, who stars as Scooby’s best friend Shaggy. “I was like, ‘Dude, you have a job. We need you here... in one piece.”
When “Scooby Doo” finally completed filming last fall, Gellar and Prinze returned to LA and in early February celebrated by hanging “For Sale” signs outside their respective homes. His 4,000-square-foot hacienda style villa in Toluca Lake, complete with two master suites, a two-bedroom guest house, a pool and tennis court, listed at $3.3 million. Her one-story, four-bedroom, seven-bath Sherman Oaks house with spa and outdoor kitchen came with a price tag of $2.2 million.
The twosome recently settled on LA’s upscale west side with their Akita, Tyson, and Maltese Terrier, Thor.
Gellar first pushed her beau to consider taking the part in “Scooby Doo.”
“I just wasn’t interested at all at first,” he admits. “I didn’t think Hollywood could pull it off.”
But his faith in the story line — the gang travels to Spooky Island, a popular vacation resort to unravel the mystery of who is stealing the souls from young college students — was enough to eventually bring him around.
The pair also lent their voices recently to producer John Williams’upcoming animated movie “Happily Never After.”
“It’s about what would happen if all the classic fairy tales were reversed and the bad guys won,” says Prinze, who is excited for Gellar to return for her seventh season of “Buffy” this fall, but admits, “I’ve always looked at her as a film actress and not a television actress. She plays so many beats in one moment that you need to see her on a big screen. So I push her, sometimes maybe harder than I should, but it is only because I believe in her and I want for her to be the biggest movie star in the world, so that I can retire.”
In the meantime, thoughts of starting a family are already beginning to fill their heads, Gellar admits: “It’s something that both of us definitely want, but I'm only 25, so we have some time.” (Sean Daly is a Santa Monica-based writer and president of Showtime Entertainment.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 15, 2002. Read the original PDF.