When Samara Weaving read the script for her latest film, Eenie Meanie, a heist thriller also starring Karl Glusman, Andy Garcia, and Steve Zahn, she knew that she had to be involved in the project. She swiftly auditioned for the role of Edie—a former getaway driver pulled back into a life of crime by her first love—slipping quite naturally into her character’s tumultuous emotional landscape. The real challenge? Weaving had never actually driven a car before: not to the supermarket, or even to the mall as a teenager in Canberra, Australia.
“I didn’t know how to drive, and I totally lied to everyone; I’d never been behind a wheel,” she says casually over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. But she was determined: “Usually if I’m a bit scared of a role, I should do it.”
Over the last few years, Weaving has become a bonafide scream queen—her breakout moment coming via The Babysitter (2017), a coming-of-age slasher flick in which she played the satanic, cult-pilled lead. Since then, she’s appeared in the 2019 bloody horror-comedy Ready or Not (she just wrapped filming for the sequel) as well as Scream VI (2023). Getting into the gory genre wasn’t necessarily the plan, nor was she a fan of such films growing up. Weaving recalls having to leave the theater during 101 Dalmatians because she was afraid of Glenn Close’s Cruella de Vil—but she does have a solid scream.
“I fell into it,” she explains. “I was auditioning for everything under the sun, and horror-comedy is what I got…. It’s actually really hard, having to pretend that you’re being killed. There’s something bizarrely vulnerable about doing that.”
That would have terrified “five-year-old Sam,” who was really quite timid, often hiding behind her parents’ legs. (It’s hard to imagine now, even over Zoom: Weaving is captivating, rolling silly jokes and accents into her observations.) “I was so shy, really early on,” Weaving remembers. “My parents got the idea to put me into drama school. That helped me get out of my shell because it was a safe space where you’re allowed to be weird. There are no social constructs; you don’t have to try and fit in or try to be cool. That really helped socially and made me want to be an actor.”
Weaving’s family moved around a lot during her early childhood, spending time in Italy, Indonesia, and ultimately Australia, where she attended school from the age of 13. Amid all the travel, she found comfort in television and films. “There was stability and safety in watching the same shows everywhere I go,” Weaving explains. “I would sit in our little den, and me and Dad would watch Friends when he came home from work. We couldn’t watch it on cable because it was Indonesia, so he bought a box set with Indonesian subtitles.” Other favorites were John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (“I watched that every day for a week”) and Jason Reitman’s Juno.
Film also runs in the family: Her father is a filmmaker and now the artistic director of the Canberra International Film Festival, and her uncle, Hugo Weaving, is an acclaimed English actor.
Though Canberra was a small town—“no glitz and glam,” as Weaving puts it—that foundation led to her first auditions in her teens; to a long arc on Home and Away, the Australian soap opera that launched the careers of actors like Chris Hemsworth, Heath Ledger, and Naomi Watts; and to some early modeling gigs. She built up the courage to move to Los Angeles in 2013, at the age of 21, and commit herself to acting: “I was naive, and that really worked in my favor,” she says now. “I didn’t think, Oh, this could go badly. My frontal lobe had not developed yet.”
Looking back on that period, Weaving wishes she’d held on to that bravery, that youthful confidence, more tightly. Then again, it hasn’t entirely gone away: While the horror films keep calling, her hope is also to find more films, roles, and environments that challenge her acting abilities. When Weaving was working with Nicole Kidman on season one of Nine Perfect Strangers, the Hulu limited series based on Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, the latter Aussie actress shared a key anecdote: “She said that she was working with a DP, and he was shooting over her shoulder. She naturally cheated out so that her face would be on camera. And he went, ‘No, no, let the audience wonder what you’re thinking,’” Weaving shares. “I loved that.”
“I’m grateful that people are not boxing me in on the genre pieces anymore,” Weaving adds. “Not that I don’t love doing [horror], but it is fun to try other hats on.” Her next film is a Bonnie and Clyde–style love story called Carolina Caroline, directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier. It takes place in the South in the 1990s, and Weaving equates reading the romantic thriller’s script with striking gold: “I read it and fell in love,” she says. “Tom Dean, the writer, captured that time and that nostalgia of a hot, sweaty Southern summer. It’s just sexy and funny and heartbreaking and beautiful.”
Carolina Caroline, which also stars Kyra Sedgwick, Jon Gries, and Kyle Gallner, will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Though Weaving prefers the back lot to the buzz of Hollywood—“I try to focus on the actual making of the movie, boots on the ground… That’s the fun part of it for me; that’s what I fell in love with,” she says. She’s quite excited for the glitz and glamour of the red carpet this time around. “Getting all dressed up, making your hair all nice, and all the cameras flashing…” she says. “That’s the Hollywood little Sam thought of. I channel that five-year-old Sam, who would be so excited.”
In this story: hair, Sondrea “Dre” Demry-Sanders; makeup, Susie Sobol.