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Freddie Prinze Jr. celebrated his milestone 50th birthday on Sunday and will undoubtedly be spending it with his wife Sarah Michelle Gellar.
The couple are one of Hollywood’s most well-known success stories and will mark their 24th wedding anniversary in September.
Yet it’s a union that many didn’t expect to last, with Freddie himself confessing that they were just two ‘dumb kids’ when they met on the set of the 1997 horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Now, as Freddie rings in a new decade, the Daily Mail takes a look at his love story with Sarah Michelle.
Their characters were not involved in the film. Freddie’s character Ray was in love with Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie while Helen, played by Sarah, dated Barry, played by Ryan Phillippe.
The pair quickly became friends, with Freddie driving Sarah to the gym because she didn’t have a driver’s licence.
‘We just would talk about life and stuff like that, and we had completely different philosophies on just about everything,’ he told Us Weekly.
‘Cause she was a born and raised New Yorker and I was a born and raised LA kid, and we just looked at everything like night and day.’
Reflecting on their meeting, Freddie told USA Weekly last year: ‘We were just dumb kids that fell in love, man. We were in our 20s, making mistakes left and right and just kind of found each other.
‘And we already trusted each other ‘cause we were friends first, and it just made the relationship really easy, man.
Freddie recalled the early days of their relationship at the premiere of the 2025 reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer which they attended together.
Speaking to Access Hollywood, he said: ‘We were friends for a good couple of years before any sort of date happened.
‘We met on that movie and became really close, really good friends. We lived ten minutes away from each other so we made it a point to maintain the friendship and it turned into something else.
Even their first date happened by accident. They were both meant to attend a group dinner with a few other friends but everyone backed out except them so they had dinner together.
‘We were supposed to go out with a group of people, and everybody else bailed… so it was just the two of us,’ Freddie said on The Howard Stern Show.
They dated for a few years before Freddie popped the question in 2001. The couple has never revealed the details of the proposal with Sarah previously saying: ‘I didn’t want a big public proposal. I wanted something private.’
Art imitated life around the time Freddie and Sarah became engaged when they both signed on to star in the live-action film Scooby Doo, released in 2002.
The film started shooting in February 2001 and the pair announced their engagement that April.
They played one of animations most famous couples – Freddie as Fred Jones and Sarah as Daphne Blake.
The film was a box office success, grossing $275.7 million at the box office and they both returned for the sequel Monsters Unleashed two years later.
Freddie poured hot water on the idea of the couple working together again however.
‘We only worked together while we were together on Scooby-Doo, and otherwise neither one of us, I felt, thought it would be very interesting for us to be in a job together,’ he told ET Canada.
‘I don’t think it’s that exciting to watch two people struggle to be together when, you know, they’re going home together at the end of the night.’
Freddie and Sarah married at a resort in Mexico in 2002 with the bride wearing a strapless gown by Vera Wang while the groom sported a white linen Sy Devour suit.
The couple went on to welcome their first child, a daughter named Charlotte in 2009. Their son Rocky was born three years later.
In an interview with Access, Sarah told how when Rocky was a little boy, Freddie wanted to show him that girls can fight and played clips of Sarah in her most famous role as Buffy Summers on Buffy The Vampire Slayer to prove it.
‘One day I came home and my son was saying, girl’s cant fight. I heard Freddie say, really, are you sure? He said, watch this and it was a YouTube compliation of all my best fights. We explained to him that it was me,’ she said.
When asked to provide the secret to a happy marriage, Sarah told People: ‘Take the 10 minutes – put the phone down. Have a cup of coffee together. Walk the dog at the end of the night. Read a story with your kids,’ Sarah explained to
‘Make the most of the time that you have. We are all pulled in so many directions, so make sure that, whichever one you are focusing on, you’re present.’
On their anniversary last year, Sarah shared a throwback snap of the couple’s special day in Mexico.
’23 years, 276 months, 1,196 weeks, 8,395 days, 201,480 hours, 12,088,800 minutes and 725,328,000 seconds give or take…But who’s counting?!?’ she wrote.
