Sarah Michelle Gellar asks fans not to engage with any leaks from scrapped Buffy reboot

Yesterday, host of the Page Six P6 Radio podcast Danny Murphy and Evan Real told Gellar that they hope the script or the pilot eventually leaks so Buffy fans can see it for themselves. “I actually hope it doesn’t,” Gellar responded, per Variety. “Because then everyone’s going to have an opinion on this and that, and pilots are not finished. It wasn’t done, right? It’s not like we did a season and finished it and then they shelved it. It’s not like when they made Batgirl the movie, right, and then didn’t show it.” 

Explaining that pilots are made because “there’s things you learn from it and there’s things you fix,” Gellar reminded the hosts that the pilot for the original Buffy series was also quite different from what made it to air. “It was a different Willow, I mean it’s a very different show. But those are learning tools and that’s what a pilot is.”

Gellar also said that she’s seen one version of a “pilot” circulating online already, but that version is “not correct.” “That stuff is really unfortunate and I ask fans, if you see scripts, if you see it leaked — don’t watch it. Because you’re not getting our vision and all of that.”

Without actually sharing a pilot script, Variety reported yesterday it had gotten a copy of the pilot written by Nora and Lilla Zuckerman. In that version, Buffy had only one line at the end of the script, which instead focused mostly on a character named Nova. The character would have been played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who just turned 16. The pilot was filmed last summer and execs apparently thought it skewed too young. A new draft was written to age up some of the cast and to include more Buffy, but Hulu reportedly felt it wasn’t worth spending more money to reshoot another pilot.