Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come: Australian actor Samara Weaving has become synonymous with horror fare

In Samara Weaving’s head, there is a symphony of sad songs.

Holocene by Bon Iver. Bass Boat by Zach Bryan. Blue Eyes by Cary Brothers. Iris by Goo Goo Dolls. They all play on repeat as the actor goes into a melancholic trance. Her eyes brim with tears.

Then, an assistant swoops in and removes her headphones. The director calls “action” and Weaving snaps into whichever tier of despair the scene at hand demands.

“I have Pavlov’s dogged myself,” Weaving says of her go-to “sad” playlist. “If I hear these songs anywhere, I’ll just start crying.”

On-screen, Weaving is often in distress. Over the past few years, the Australian actor, 34, has established herself as a go-to scream queen in a bevy of genre films, including Ready Or Not, Guns Akimbo, Mayhem, Borderline and Eenie Meanie.

“I find it quite strangely therapeutic. You get to do things that are so socially unacceptable, like scream and bash people up,” Weaving says. “At the end of the day, I’m exhausted, but I’m also like, ‘Huh, I don’t have any anger left in me. It’s all been burnt up’.”

She’s about to give birth to her latest projects: the sequel film Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, in cinemas now, and her first child, with her husband, writer and director Jimmy Warden, a baby girl due in early April.

“That’s the scary unknown, isn’t it?” she says. “There’s a lot of change coming.”

When Weaving travelled to Los Angeles for her first major Hollywood callback — the title role in the 2017 horror-comedy The Babysitter — she booked a two-week stay at a cheap motel that had seemed decent from afar.

In reality, “it was pretty grim,” she says. “I had a little room with brown carpet with really suspicious stains on it. At night, it’s evident that this is where sex workers meet, and I’m going up to the front desk asking, if there’s a printer, could they print out the sides for the chemistry test?” used in auditions to gauge co-star compatibility.

Cut to a decade later and that West Hollywood motel complex has been reinvented as the San Vicente Bungalows, an exclusive, members-only club where annual dues run in the thousands.

Weaving is now a member, and we met there for lunch on a grey and cold (by LA standards) February day. As for her grimy former room, she thinks it has been converted into the club’s private screening room.

“It’s the most Hollywood story, actually,” she says over a chopped salad and iced matcha with oat milk.

There’s a certain irony to Weaving’s now-posh choice of venue, given the eat-the-rich messaging of the Ready Or Not films. In them, she plays Grace, an outsider whose wealthy in-laws hunt her in a murderous game of hide-and-seek on her wedding night. Grace survived that ordeal and the sequel picks up the morning after, where it’s revealed that Grace’s victory has triggered a second game, and she’ll have to outplay a new group of billionaires vying for control of the world.

For Weaving, that meant another physically demanding shoot spent running, crying, screaming and getting splattered with blood at every turn.

“It is exhausting watching her,” says Sarah Michelle Gellar, who portrays a bloodthirsty billionaire in the sequel. “I would say to her every day, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re number one on the call sheet’.”

Weaving often plays characters with a feral quality — women ready to burn it all down, expectations and appearances be damned. She spends the two Ready Or Not films in a blood-soaked, shredded wedding gown. Her hair is matted. Her eyes vacillate between twitchy defeat and stony resolve. She summons guttural screams and hawks loogies as she executes complicated fight sequences.

“To know her is to know that vanity is not a part of who she is,” Gellar says.

The first Ready Or Not film made nearly 10 times its meagre reported $US6 million ($8.73m) budget at the global box office in 2019. And the directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, wanted to up the stakes of the sequel after witnessing what Weaving could deliver on set.

“We knew what she was capable of on the dramatic side and as an action performer, and knew that we wanted to amplify both of those things,” Gillett says in a video interview. Still, they had to put parameters on what Weaving would endure, he adds. “You have to tell her when to take a breather because there’s not an off switch. She just can go and go and go.”

Weaving was born in Adelaide, but spent most of her childhood moving around Asia and Europe for her father’s work as a management consultant.

Although her paternal uncle is actor Hugo Weaving, she says she didn’t interact with him much growing up. Her first exposure to his work came from randomly selecting a copy of The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert from her father’s DVD collection. “I remember being like, ‘Wait, hold on. What’s happening? That’s my uncle,’” Weaving says.

When her family moved back to Australia and settled in Canberra when she was about 13, Weaving began participating in school and regional theatre productions. Her father consulted her uncle on industry tips, procured a manager for his teenage daughter and routinely drove her to Sydney for auditions, where she quickly booked work on local TV shows Out Of The Blue and Home And Away.

After a stint in London, she arrived in LA in her early 20s, following a wave of other Australian soap opera vets who had already found Hollywood success: Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce, Isla Fisher, Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts, the Hemsworth brothers and more. Agencies had become accustomed to recognising the long-running Home And Away and Neighbours as breeding grounds for talent, she says, and gave her a chance.

“They’d never watched the show, thank God,” Weaving says of Home And Away, adding, “I wasn’t great on it, but I was able to get in certain rooms because of the reputation that show had.”

On paper, Weaving is Barbie-esque: blonde hair, blue eyes, lithe frame. But she never landed the It-girl or stereotypical romantic lead roles, she says. Instead, her first big break came in The Babysitter, in which her character appears to be a male fantasy — until the first act ends with her stabbing two large knives into a teenager’s head and it’s revealed that she’s part of a satanic cult.

“She’s the most fearless actor I’ve ever had the privilege of working with and as smart as they come,” says Babysitter director, McG. “She’s just magic in a bottle.”

The actors Weaving most admires are Helena Bonham Carter, Patricia Arquette and Benicio del Toro — performers who are “a bit weird” and “make strange choices,” she says. Likewise, “I love directors who can recognise, ‘Oh, Sam’s a bit strange. Let’s just let her be a bit weird’.”

In an email, Margot Robbie says that Weaving’s weirdness is “probably what I love about her most”.

The two actors have become close friends and are often compared to each other for their similar looks. “Our husbands, if they drink enough, they get confused,” Weaving says. “My phone thinks I’m her in photos.”

The women also shared scenes in the 2022 Hollywood epic Babylon, in which Weaving played an aspiring actor who gets upstaged by Robbie’s larger-than-life character. While shooting, Weaving had what she describes as “the gnarliest migraine I’ve ever experienced in my life”.

Yet, Robbie says, Weaving “has that Aussie work ethic. The roll-up-your-sleeves and get it done mentality”. As a result, Robbie adds, “She just rocked up to set and gave 150 per cent despite how sick she was feeling.”

Weaving will follow Ready Or Not 2 with Over Your Dead Body, a dark comedy in which she stars with Jason Segel, and Carolina Caroline, a Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque crime thriller.

The three projects marked a subtle shift for Weaving, who says she has been prone to taking films that she wasn’t completely enthusiastic about for fear of “not knowing if you’re going to work again”. But lately, “It’s either a hell yes or a hell no,” she says, using a stronger expletive.

Weaving says that after she gives birth, she might take a break from acting. Or not.

“If the war movie calls me a month after I give birth, I’m going to have to do it,” she says. “If something incredible presents itself like two months postpartum, I’ll be like, ‘OK, better snap back’ — or, maybe I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I want to quit’.”

For now, she says, “I’m just going to continue to follow the hell yeses.”

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come is in cinemas now

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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