What Really Happened To Michelle Trachtenberg?

One of the most promising kid actors of the 1990s, Michelle Trachtenberg first made big impressions on youthful viewers in Nickelodeon-branded projects like the surreal "The Adventures of Pete & Pete" and film adaptations of "Harriet the Spy" and "Inspector Gadget." She'd later become one of the most notable young adult actors of the 2000s, portraying love-to-hate teen Dawn Summers on the cult classic "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the villainous Georgina Sparks across several seasons of the popular "Gossip Girl," and starring in movies such as "Ice Princess" and "EuroTrip."

But over the last decade or so, Trachtenberg entered the realm of once mega-famous child stars who completely disappeared. She didn't quit acting or move too far out of mainstream Hollywood — she's just refocused her efforts on less visible projects, such as acting in cable limited series and popping up for guest star spots on network dramas, and she spends her time on things besides getting in front of a camera. Here's what Michelle Trachtenberg has been up to since the end of "Gossip Girl" in the early 2010s.

After stealing scenes as Georgina Sparks on the teen soap "Gossip Girl," Michelle Trachtenberg was set to parlay her breakout star status into a main role on a network TV show. In 2010, while "Gossip Girl" was still in production, that show's creators, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, announced that they were in the process of building a show around Trachtenberg, in which she'd portray a budding criminologist with a gift for creating psychological profiles of criminals while also running away from a shocking personal history. Based on an idea offered by Trachtenberg, a pilot was written and was supposed to be filmed in order to interest a network into debuting it for the fall of 2011, but the project never came to fruition.

Four years later, Trachtenberg co-starred in another potential TV series, but at least that one made it to the sample-episode phase. "Save the Date," a sitcom created by "That '70s Show" writers Jeff and Jackie Filgo, found Maggie Lawson playing a woman tasked with finding a man to marry because she got drunk and found a perfect place to hold a wedding; Trachtenberg was cast as her straight-laced sister. Like Trachtenberg's crime drama, "Save the Date" wasn't picked up to series either.

While she made an effort to get back into regularly broadcast network television in the 2010s with a couple of unrealized projects, Michelle Trachtenberg knowingly and willingly allowed some gaps in her resume following her first major small-screen success. Following her 2000 to 2003 run on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," she didn't want to get stuck playing just one character, over and over again, and for an indefinite period of time. The actor accepted film and guest star roles at the time instead, including the feature "EuroTrip" and a spot as a pop star for an arc on "Six Feet Under."

"Honestly, when I left 'Buffy,' I never thought I'd go back to TV, because I've done it. I'm not a person to repeat myself creativity-wise," Trachtenberg told Entertainment Weekly. "And I found TV to be rather stifling, especially 'Buffy.' Three years as one character — where they're not changing the character and your abilities aren't being tested or challenged — gets very repetitive." By 2009, Trachtenberg had apparently changed her mind, because she was a member of the main cast of the NBC medical drama "Mercy," which ran for just one season before cancellation.

Still in high demand as a big screen actor in the late 2000s, Michelle Trachtenberg was presented with a wide selection of roles. Her work in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" directly led to offers of significant roles in major motion pictures. But the show's intensive shooting schedule unfortunately precluded Trachtenberg from accepting some roles, such as the troubled-kid drama "Thirteen." "I was actually supposed to star in that, but I was on 'Buffy' at the time," Trachtenberg told US Weekly of losing the gig to Evan Rachel Wood.

When "Thirteen" director Catherine Hardwicke landed the job helming the film adaptation of the mega-bestselling teen vampire novel "Twilight," she once again approached Trachtenberg. "There was definitely interest here and there because there's only so few pale girls in Hollywood," the actor said. But when production on the 2008 movie began, Trachtenberg couldn't find the time, committed to a series of projects including the movies "Kickin' It Old School," "The Circuit," and "Against the Current." "I already have 'Buffy.' I've already done the vampire thing," Trachtenberg added.

In one of the biggest scandals to ever hit Warner Brothers, actor Ray Fisher in 2020 publicly called out his "Justice League" director Joss Whedon for allegedly foul behind-the-scenes behavior. "Joss Whedon's on-set treatment of the cast and crew of 'Justice League' was gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable," Fisher wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. Warner requested an internal investigation into Fisher's accusations, and the shady truth about Joss Whedon emerged soon thereafter. Other actors that Whedon had worked with in the past subsequently discussed their experiences with the writer-director best known for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." "Joss Whedon abused his power on numerous occasions," tweeted "Buffy" actor Charisma Carpenter. "It only served to intensify my performance anxiety, disempower me, and alienate me from my peers." 

In response to an Instagram post in which series star Sarah Michelle Gellar asked to no longer "be forever associated" with Whedon, cast member Michelle Trachtenberg recalled an ugly and traumatic incident and its fallout. "So now. People know. What Joss. Did," Trachtenberg wrote. "There was a rule. Saying. He's not allowed in a room alone with Michelle again."

Once a very recognizable face across multiple teen and young adult-oriented films and television series in the 2000s and 2010s, Michelle Trachtenberg segued into a side career where she can act with only her voice. She may not be taking on many live-action roles, but Trachtenberg has stayed busy voicing characters in animated films, television series, and direct-to-video franchise entries. Fans may recognize Trachtenberg's pipes in a range of projects, including playing Blood Moon on an episode of the Adult Swim series "SuperMansion" and Tika in "Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight."

Trachtenberg got onboard with the proliferation of superhero-based content, too, playing the character of Bar Girl in the 2010 "DC Showcase" installment "Jonah Hex" as well as bringing to life the Marvel character Valkyrie in the animated "The Super Hero Squad Show."

Long and most often associated with television roles, Michelle Trachtenberg made a move into full-length films in the 2010s. Unfortunately, because these projects weren't given wide, well-promoted releases, they didn't exactly propel Trachtenberg to the A-list of movie stars. Filmed in 2007 but shelved until 2011, Trachtenberg's '80s-set comedy "Take Me Home Tonight" made a paltry $7.5 million at the box office. The 2010 action-comedy "Cop Out," in which Trachtenberg had a not widely publicized supporting role, earned a respectable $55 million but a lowly 18% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The romantic revenge drama "Sexy Evil Genius" went straight to DVD in 2013, as did the 2014 sci-fi thriller "The Scribbler."The murder mystery "Sister Cities" also couldn't muster a theatrical release and aired on TV in 2016, following Trachtenberg's 2015 Lifetime original "The Christmas Gift."

None of these films triggered a new appreciation for Trachtenberg's skill or artistry, as critics issued numerous middling to negative reviews. The Projector called "Take Me Home Tonight" a "standard, dull pseudo-teen comedy," and Ion Cinema labeled "The Scribbler" a "D-grade extravaganza of unpleasantness."

The explosion of streaming, on-demand television beckoned a new era of prestige television. Actors of high stature and extensive resumes have enjoyed career resurgences with quality shows on Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video, and '90s and 2000s stalwart Michelle Trachtenberg partook in the trend, too. Unfortunately, her shows happened to be would-be flagship series on a pair of streamers that got lost in the shuffle and went out of business entirely.

Shot in 2015 but not released until 2017, the first season of "Guidance" starred Trachtenberg as a counselor working with a teenage student to cope with an illicit photo leak. The series aired on go90, a youth-oriented mobile TV service operated by communications giant Verizon, which shuttered in 2018 after losing millions of dollars. Also in 2018, Trachtenberg voiced Judy Reilly in the Facebook Watch animated comedy "Human Kind Of." Over the course of 21 episodes, Trachtenberg's character dealt with high school and the new, weird knowledge that she was part alien. The show didn't receive a second season, and then parent company Meta closed down its Facebook Watch Originals brand altogether. The shows could have been well received, but their audiences were so minuscule that it didn't bring much attention to Trachtenberg.

Michelle Trachtenberg has made a few public statements over the years about not wanting to creatively repeat herself — she's fine with missing out on the vampire franchise "Twilight" because she'd already been a part of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and she didn't want to make similar TV shows after departing small-screen hits. In recent years, however, Trachtenberg's stance has softened. She has appeared in fewer than a dozen films and TV shows over the past decade (and in nothing past 2023), and a sizable portion of those roles that Trachtenberg did take traffic in her performances of yore.

The actor voiced characters on six separate episodes of the animated sketch comedy "Robot Chicken," most recently in 2018 to send up the title character she played in "Harriet the Spy" on a show created by her "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" costar Seth Green. Trachtenberg's most recent screen performance was a revival of Georgina Sparks from "Gossip Girl." The actor appeared as the character on two episodes, in 2022 and 2023, of the Max reboot of the 2000s CW soap, which was subsequently canceled.

Michelle Trachtenberg began working as a professional actor at the age of 3, and she has carefully managed the transition from kid roles to a more subdued adult career. As opposed to child stars who died in absolutely bizarre ways or faded into obscurity, Trachtenberg made it through relatively unscathed, and she attributes that to how she was reared and how she conducted herself as a young performer. "I'm very lucky I didn't really have pitfalls," Trachtenberg told "HuffPost Live" in 2013. "I was raised in a very loving and strict way. My mom was really adamant: 'You ever do a drug in your life, I'll kill you with my bare hands.'"

To that end, Trachtenberg claims to have never abused substances. "I've never done a drug in my life. It's not something that I think about, only when asked these questions," the actor said. "I value and appreciate my career so much, and this is the rest of my life. This is how I make a living, this is how I pay my bills. This is what I hope to be doing for the next 50 years, in longevity. Why would I want to do something to mess it up, to take it all away?" That stability she treasures in her personal and professional life has allowed her certain advantages in Hollywood. "I was very picky in projects and I arguably got lucky," Trachtenberg explained.

The history of ice skating indicates that it's a dangerous sport, and Michelle Trachtenberg suffered some real-life and lingering injuries while training to play such an athlete in a movie. In the 2005 film "Ice Princess," Trachtenberg portrayed a figure skating prodigy, and it had to look realistic on screen. "I trained extremely hard for the movie. When we weren't shooting, I was working, training five hours a day, five days a week," Trachtenberg told Black Film. She endured eight months of pre-film training in that manner, and then when factoring in choreography sessions and shooting, the actor's "Ice Princess" schedule consisted of 20-22-hour work days for entire weeks without breaks.

The physical demands of the production led to multiple, serious injuries for Trachtenberg. "I tore a couple of ligaments, dislocated knee or so, did a little bit of here and there. It sounds really bad, but those are all things that happen to athletes," the actor recalled. "I mean, I'm very lucky because I didn't get any stress fractures, which is one of the hugest things."

Back when she was trying to nail down her first major post-"Gossip Girl" project, Michelle Trachtenberg submitted an idea for a crime drama that was developed into a script but ultimately didn't become a series. That was an early strike in an adulthood career shift for the ex-teen actor. For many years, Trachtenberg has actively pursued writing for film and television. Around 2008, the then-23-year-old successfully sold a script about a serial murderer, which helped her land a membership in the Writers Guild of America, the predominant screenwriters union in Hollywood.

Trachtenberg also wrote a based-on-reality saga that stretches from the 1950s to the 1980s and a television pilot about a magazine editor who wants to be a writer. "I feel like a Hollywood version of Harriet's life," Trachtenberg told Entertainment Weekly, a reference to "Harriet the Spy," her 1996 kids' movie about an amateur detective and reporter. "My love of writing came from reading and being Harriet the Spy." Unfortunately, nothing that Trachtenberg composed and sold has been fully produced by a studio or network yet.

Many well-known actors look nothing like they used to, often on account of an ill-advised surgical procedure or two. To stay relevant and employable in Hollywood is to stay looking youthful, and many performers will resort to an operation to preserve or restore their appearance, only to wind up looking different than they used to anyway. In 2024, rumors spread online that former child star Michelle Trachtenberg, now in her late 30s and not appearing in as many high-profile TV and film projects as she once did, had undergone cosmetic surgery and that as a result, she looked somewhat unrecognizable. According to the actor, the rumors are just that. "I've received several comments recently about my appearance. I have never had plastic surgery I am happy and healthy. Check yourself haters," Trachtenberg wrote on her Instagram account in January 2024, alongside a current photo of herself. 

The next day, Trachtenberg posted another contemporary selfie to Instagram and addressed the suggestion that she was dealing with an eating order, pointing out that she was actually just aging normally. "Fun fact. This is my face. Not malnutrition no problems. Why do you have you [sic] hate? Get a calendar."