samara weaving ready or not here i come actress acting australia pregnant cover shoot editorial photo morganne boulden polyesterzine polyester zine over your dead body carolina caroline polyesterzine polyester zine — Our present era’s reigning scream queen Samara Weaving has discovered an industry secret. If your schedule aligns so that you have three movies released back to back over your pregnancy, you won’t have a drastic career fall off and, if anything, you’ll be booked, busy and fresh in the minds of casting agents and brand marketers all over the world. “There's this fear that you're going to be forgotten and people are going to assume you're out for ages, which is wild,” she explains. “It's worked out well for me because even though I'm not actively working on anything, all these things are coming out so I don't have that fear of, ‘oh gosh, everyone's gonna forget about me - and I'm never gonna work again - and everything's gonna be terrible’!”
“I've been really trying to avoid doing the kind of mainstream soft pregnancy shoot where you’re on a beach holding your belly,” Weaving tells me over Zoom, beaming in from LA on a particularly grey day in England. She tells me she loves the grey and the cold, “when it rains in LA I get so excited, when it’s sunny I can’t stay in and read books,” likening her soul to a little emo girl. Her baby shower rocked, with her closest girls coming over to celebrate by watching Juno and the playlist leaning more Blink 182 than classical harps or whatever. “It was like the anti baby shower and this felt like the anti pregnancy shoot, in a fur coat and the stripper heels.”

Seven years after the original movie’s release, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, literally takes off from where the last film (for those that haven’t seen it, it’s like: what if rich people made Hide and Seek evil?) ended and with an incredibly stacked cast. In Over Your Dead Body, Weaving stars alongside Jason Segel where the couple plan to spend time in a secluded cabin in the woods not knowing that they each plan on killing each other. Initially premiering the 50th anniversary of Toronto Film Festival in September last year, Dinner in America director Adam Reiheimer’s latest indie treasure Carolina Caroline received a full 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. In it, Weaving plays opposite Kyle Gallner in a Bonnie & Clyde style 70’s adventure across Southern USA, it’s set for a full US release sometime this year. “When it rains, it pours, hey!”

Onstage at the festival, after hilariously revealing she was feeling “coco loco” and that she was a “massive fan of this ding dong” in reference to co-star Gallner, Weaving refreshingly shoutouts to her dialect coach Liz Himelstein who helped transform her own friendly Aussie accent into something more authentically West Texan. “I think if you get it wrong it’s really distracting,” Weaving admits, noting that the script being written with that accent at the forefront added such a beautiful texture to the whole film overall. “It has a melody to it that's so lovely and syrupy and there’s a kindness where even when she’s being cold and cruel, there’s still a likability just from her voice.” Makeup artist Erin LeBre sweetened the deal by adding in her freckles and rosy cheeks, whilst the costume department sourced some cute vintage outfits. “I didn’t have to do much,” she jokes. “Kyle just fell in love with that.”

No spoilers but one simple sleight of hand-style money trick soon escalates to a series of bank robberies. “There were some funnier bank robberies where my character is trying to figure out the persona and she's a bit awkward doing it,” Weaving fondly recalls, mentioning how it felt “kind of empowering” and then laughing about they nicknamed the disguise wig Edna Mode after the bobbed diva from The Incredibles. “They were all local banks in Kentucky and the families of the banks wanted to be in the scene, I’m like, why would you want to live out your worst nightmare?” In one of the more intense bank scenes, she admits to terrifying a child to tears. “This kid hadn't acted before and I don't think anyone had really briefed her on what was about to happen,” Weaving reveals. Thinking they might make use of this shot, “we turn around to get her close up, and she's just giggling at me.”

“In looking for new projects, Weaving tends to read everything that comes across her desk but looks especially for characters that allow her to be a little bit unhinged.”

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come marks Weaving’s first ever sequel, following on from the first amped up version of Hide and Seek. In real life, she’s more into board games like Ticket to Ride or an open world-style Assassin’s Creed player. “I’m so relieved and excited that it got a good response and that fans are really loving it,” she says, noting how the pressure was on to make something that holds up to the first movie and its cult-like following: that it does! “We didn’t have a massive budget and it wasn’t a glamorous shoot,” Weaving explains, with the star-studded cast featuring Elijah Wood, Sarah-Michelle Gellar and even a cameo from horror king David Cronenberg. “These people were just fans of the first one and were down to play, which was so fun and surreal.”

In a press tour clip from IMDB, Wood and Gellar discuss how Weaving often grounds her performances through animal-like qualities. “I do animal work which is sort of embarrassing,” Weaving admits, astutely aware that’s a particularly weird technique. Very theatrical. “One of my favourites is for Nine Perfect Strangers, my character [Jessica Chandler] is described in the book as being a baby giraffe so I watched baby giraffe videos and imitated how they're floppy and have this funny little walk.” She starts moving like a giraffe on my screen which made me laugh. “She was that LA influencer type so it really helped, and with this, Grace was a lone wolf so she has this growl to her and she’s like looking for her pack, yeah… just, embarrassing shit.”

Weaving is additionally billed as a producer this time around, though she admits the endless hustle and compromise doesn’t make it her favourite job in the world (“I'd rather just rock up on set and be a ding dong, to be honest”) Weaving explains how it’s especially different with this team. “They really hear me and they're so collaborative, they really wanted me to be a part of this process. So it was a really great experience in that sense.” This time, Weaving’s character Grace is joined by her on-screen sister Faith, as played by Kathryn Newton who she helped to cast.

“Kathryn’s the best and so funny and professional and really fun,” she gushes, her fondness clearly translating in their on-screen chemistry. “The directors played Cupid a little bit as they’d worked with her before and almost set us up on a date,” she describes how they very organically fell into their sisterly dynamic after their initial meeting. “I think they knew that we were both really weird and would get along, I’d be DMing boys on her behalf trying to get her a Toronto boyfriend.”

Spending the majority of the film covered in fake blood, (“luckily red is my colour”), thankfully, the cast were primarily shooting inside a lot and in Springtime as opposed to outside a lot in the middle of Winter as before. “It was pretty uncomfortable having like 10 people just squirting you,” she admits. “On the first one, we didn’t know how much goo was going to have to be matched every day but in the second one makeup, effects and wardrobe helped me out by literally dying the dress red, rather than having to spray it down every day so I’m not sticky.”

“Weaving as an actress is neither afraid to dig deep into her emotions or lean into being a silly sausage which makes her incredibly entertaining to watch.”

Similarly carnaged, Over Your Dead Body also premiered alongside RON2HIC at SXSW, in a Weaving double bill. “I’m obsessed with everyone on that job,” says Weaving about the movie’s equally stacked lineup including her on-screen husband Jason Segel and the legendarily bonkers Juliette Lewis. She describes her character, Lisa, as an “Aussie bitch” with borrowed mannerisms of all her Australian gal pals amped up to the max. “It’s so fun and insane and nuts, when Jorma [Taccone, director] sent the script and the breakdown of who was going to be in it, it was a no brainer! And then I read it and thought this is genius, it’s so silly.” The poster’s artwork is posed like the American Gothic painting but with both Segel and Weaving partially maimed and and brandishing weapons in front of their cabin.

One incredible Easter egg is the EDM style clubland Ibiza tracks blasting out the red sportscar you see in the trailer. These rave tracks are actually originals to this movie with Weaving and her co-stars recording the lyrics, “Juliette Lewis’ one was like ‘Welcome to Ibizaaaa’ and mine was like ‘you want to see this ass???’” – our conversation pauses at the sound of a phone ringing, it’s an incoming call from Marshawn Lynch: “what’s he calling me for?!”

In looking for new projects, Weaving tends to read everything that comes across her desk but looks especially for characters that allow her to be a little bit unhinged. For the original Ready or Not, her husband Jimmy Warden jokingly suggested “you have to do this just because you punch a kid in the back”, and when else would she ever get the chance?

Her characters tend to find themselves fighting for their lives in unrelatable and unique situations, Weaving as an actress is neither afraid to dig deep into her emotions or lean into being a silly sausage which makes her incredibly entertaining to watch. In the recent past, if she had the misfortune of finding herself in any of these scenarios, she admits she would have frozen still. “I used to be like a deer in headlights,” she describes. “But I did a bunch of somatic therapy with my limbic system and now I fight back: which is great.” There’s also the scream.

Having the ability to physically manifest such a terrifyingly raw and guttural sound is an incredible superpower to have as an actress within the horror genre, and Weaving’s is the best in the business. But how do you even discover that you have such a loudly unique talent? “It was on a TV show called Ash vs. Evil Dead and I was working for like a week on it and I’d never done any horror genre things before,” she then explains how in the classic Evil Dead style; the house starts attacking her and the director explains how when the camera pushes that’s the cue to scream. “I remember thinking as I’m screaming: this is a good scream, this is a crazy scream I’ve never heard and this coming out of me is wild. They yelled ‘cut’ and people started clapping.” The rest is cinematic history.

Samara Weaving on Being Emo, Pregnancy and Returning for the Sequel

“In looking for new projects, Weaving tends to read everything that comes across her desk but looks especially for characters that allow her to be a little bit unhinged.”

“Weaving as an actress is neither afraid to dig deep into her emotions or lean into being a silly sausage which makes her incredibly entertaining to watch.”

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