Sarah Michelle Gellar is happy to “grow old” alongside Freddie Prinze Jr.
The She’s All That actor turned 49 on Saturday, March 8, and his longtime partner marked the milestone by sharing an Instagram tribute complete with sweet throwback photos — and the couple’s signature sense of humor.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer star, 47, kicked off the birthday post for Prinze with a black-and-white photo of the pair kissing at their wedding, her arm wrapped around him as they smooched.
In the next slide, she added another monochrome snap from their 2002 nuptials, her arm wrapped around him as they both smiled widely.
“Happy Birthday @realfreddieprinze,” the Cruel Intentions star wrote in the caption. “The world got very lucky the day you were born, but no one more so than me (and our children).” The couple shares two kids, daughter Charlotte Grace, 15, and son Rocky James, 12.
Gellar concluded her message to Prinze by joking about their age difference — of 1 year and 1 month — writing, “I’m so glad I get to grow old with you…and that you will always have a head start!!”
The ‘90s and 2000s pop culture icons — who met while filming 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and later starred as Fred Jones and Daphne Blake in James Gunn’s live-action Scooby-Doo films — recently celebrated their 22nd wedding anniversary.
The Dexter: Original Sin actress marked the milestone by sharing a sweet photo of herself and Prinze, the actor’s arms wrapped around her, on Instagram in September 2024.
She opted for a simple caption, writing, “22 @realfreddieprinze,” and adding a few wedding-themed emojis: “🥂💍👰🏼.”
Gellar and Prinze first crossed paths on the set of their iconic teen slasher — but it wasn’t love at first sight, they later revealed. While chatting with PEOPLE back in 2001, Prinze admitted that the couple “really didn’t dig each other” at first.
But as they got to know each other, things changed and they formed a strong platonic bond. “One day I gave her a ride to the gym,” Prinze recalled. “We talked on the way up, and she was a cool chick.”
“We were friends for a good two years before we went on a date. She knew what kind of guy I was,” he previously explained to E! News. “She knew what my morals were, what my priorities were and vice versa.”
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And it may have been fate, as that first date in January 2000 that Prinze mentioned was actually an accident, according to Gellar. “We were friends for a very long time,” she told PEOPLE in 2020. “We’d had many dinners before. And we were supposed to go with someone else, and the third person didn’t make it out, and we decided to still go.”
“We were just two people at dinner catching up,” she explained. “We had a long car ride and a long dinner and things just happened.”
But all it took was that one dinner for Prinze to know Gellar was the one. “I didn’t go on dates with other girls,” he previously told PEOPLE, “nor did I even want to pursue dates with other girls.”
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