Sarah Michelle Gellar Confirms She Won't Return To 'Cruel Intentions'

When it was announced that Cruel Intentions would be given another shot at a TV adaptation from Prime Video, there was only one question worth asking — will it involve the original cast?

For Sarah Michelle Gellar, at least, we now know the answer to be “no.”

“I heard about it online,” she recently told Variety. “I was contacted afterwards, but I heard about it online.”

The original classic movie was a ‘90s take on the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. It followed two step-siblings, played by Gellar and Ryan Phillippe, and their wager as to whether or not the latter would succeed in sleeping with the new headmaster’s virgin daughter (Reese Witherspoon) before the next term began.

Also starring Selma Blair and Joshua Jackson, Cruel Intentions became deeply beloved for its unhinged characters and storylines that were largely still considered taboo for teen content at the time.

A pilot was ordered by NBC in 2016 that would have seen Gellar reprise her role while manipulating a new generation of her family, but despite high anticipating among fans of the film, it ultimately wasn’t ordered to series.

“I’ve learned a lesson with that, which is it’s a very difficult process,” she said. “And eventually, or inevitably, you’re going to be let down. Because some people want a new [version], some people want this, and my place in something like that only makes you compare it to the original.”

She added that “if there’s a new take and new whatever, then they get a chance to stand on their own.”

While that may be true in a sense, ordering an adaptation of an adaptation without any meaningful ties to what we’ve come to know as Cruel Intentions begs the question of why Amazon doesn’t simply create a new adaptation of the original novel entirely. Many have been made in the past, including both a Starz series and a Netflix film that were released last year — with the latter set in high school and sounding like a modern take on Cruel Intentions already.

Perhaps the new TV series will find a brand new audience, but for those who were hoping for this Cruel Intentions to actually be Cruel Intentions, it might just be time to revisit the movie itself.