How Does Buffy Juggle Roles, Career and Kids? Sarah Michelle Gellar Reveals Lessons Learned

In-depth interview with the Ringer star on her new show and working with vampires

Working moms, Sarah Michelle Gellar would like to tip her hat to you all. And once you have Buffy's support, there is no cooler stamp of approval.

SMG is a working mom herself, and when she spilled to Entertainment Weekly for the magazine's cover story (out now), our E! News cameras were there to capture the magic. Gellar talked about the heartache, reward and stress that goes into juggling career and family, plus great tidbits on her much-anticipated return to TV with the CW thriller Ringer…

"It's been difficult," Gellar admitted to EW editor Jess Cagle. "My hat goes off to any working parent. It is the hardest to juggle. I know my job is by no means the hardest in the world, but to any parents, again, it is so difficult because you're trying to focus so hard but you're always wondering, What's my child doing? Are they OK? Did they eat their lunch? Did they eat their vegetables? Did they take their nap? It's how to separate both of them."

Speaking of separating things, SMG may be a seasoned television pro, but even the concept of playing twin sisters (one is impersonating the other), makes her head spin. "We joke that I actually play five characters," she said. "I play Bridget in the past, I play Siobhan in the past, I play Bridget in the present and Siobhan in the present and I play 'Shiovette,' who is Bridget pretending to be Siobhan. So it's very confusing."

Um, yeah. We're supposed to be TV experts and even we have a hard time wrapping our mind around that. Thankfully, Gellar is easily confused, too. "I get confused about almost anything," she laughed. "Every so often I might find myself in a top from one character and in the pants of another character and think, Wait, wrong scene. But once you get into the scene, you realize pretty quickly who you are. And it was actually kind of funny because a lot of the castmembers hadn't done a scene with present-day Siobhan, and we just did the first one yesterday and people were like, 'Oh it's so weird, we haven't met Siobhan yet.'"

And after months of filming, SMG has really grown to love all five of her characters, and she even gets protective over them. "I don't look at them as good and bad. I look at them as them being in two different places in their lives," she said. "Had you met them eight years ago, you would call Bridget the bad twin and Siobhan the good twin. Circumstances have made it what it is, and I think that is what is so interesting about the duality of anybody. Bridget is living her life trying to redeem for all the mistakes that she has made and all the people she has hurt, and Siobhan is motivated by revenge for all the wrongs that were done to her. And they were pretty bad! I can't tell you, but I can hint." 

But her most important role lately is mother, and after so many years in the business, Gellar has definitely learned her fair share of lessons.

"I think that that is the hardest thing about what we do is the hours. They are very long, but I will say that this experience is incredibly different," she revealed. "You learn a lot from your first time. Don't do a show with vampires, at night, with stunts. There is only so much available night, and it's outside and it's cold. You want to play rich people, so we are playing rich people indoors. So we get done by 8 o'clock at night, much more civil."