Sarah Michelle Gellar rebuffed the director’s attempts to bring her back for the I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the horror sequel’s director/co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson revealed she “tried relentlessly” to get Gellar back as Helen Shivers, despite the character dying in the 1997 original.

“I mean the big one, I tried relentlessly, and she’s dead,” she said of the Buffy actress, who starred in her 2022 movie Do Revenge. “I tried, okay? I harassed her! But she is dead.”

Robinson admitted that she pitched some “crazy s**t” to Gellar to figure out a way to bring Helen back but the Cruel Intentions star shut down her ideas.

“I was like, ‘What if it’s like you weren’t dead and you’re actually alive, but in hiding?’ And Sarah’s like, ‘I was on ice. I was the most dead a person could be. You can see my frozen body,'” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Yeah, but what if?’ And she said, ‘I am dead. I am Sarah Dead Gellar.'”

While Gellar did not return for the upcoming instalment, her husband Freddie Prinze Jr. and their original co-star Jennifer Love Hewitt are back as Ray Bronson and Julie James.

In the trailer, their legacy characters help a new group of teenagers who are stalked by a mysterious killer who knows their deadly secret. They are played by Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Sarah Pidgeon, Tyriq Withers, and Jonah Hauer-King.

The horror is the fourth film in the franchise, which kicked off with the 1997 original. The upcoming instalment is a direct sequel to 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

The movie hits cinemas in July.

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