Riven with anxiety, Samara Weaving found an unlikely balm: acting in a horror film. “I was discovering this inner strength that I didn’t realise I had,” she recalls, over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “Being able to scream and run and chase people and fight back kind of shook the anxiety out of me… after that, I noticed I didn’t need my meds!”
The movie was Ready or Not, the 2019 scalpel-sharp, eat-the-rich slasher film that transformed the actor from just another talented but under-the-radar Australian export perpetually confused with Margot Robbie (don’t worry, they’re friends), to Samara Weaving, Cult Movie Star Beloved by the Internet’s Gays and Gorehounds. “They are the greatest,” the 33-year-old smiles, referring to her burgeoning fanbase. “And so wonderfully weird – I get nothing but love from them.”
Today, Weaving has more or less two careers, bridged by the deadpan, slightly grimacing comic energy she brings to so many of her performances. One strand was kickstarted by Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017, when she stole scenes as the much younger, dim-bulb girlfriend of Frances McDormand’s ex-husband. That led to work that was a little more elegant than blood and sinews – think of the bouncy classical music biopic Chevalier, or her cameo as an aspiring actor in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
But then there’s been, well, the blood and sinews: she was the Drew Barrymore-style opening-scene-victim of Scream VI, the titular Satan-worshipper in Netflix’s The Babysitter, and a canvas for all kinds of lashings of gore in the post-apocalyptic thriller Azrael. Even at home she sits amid extremes: behind Weaving is a rustic painting of pears and teacups, to her left seem to be unopened boxes of Funko Pop toys. And while she wears a simple black T-shirt, her face is supermodel glam and symmetrical, with ice blue, feline eyes.
“It’s like I have this more mainstream movie career, and then this dark, spooky underbelly,” Weaving says. “I like to do a genre movie and then something completely different. Like, OK, let’s go do a period drama in France. But then I have to go insane in something.” She’s just shot back-to-back “insane” ones – a dark comedy with Jason Segel called Over Your Dead Body, and a Ready or Not sequel. So she’s overdue for some lightness. “The film I’m going to do next doesn’t have any blood in it at all – all my horror fans will be crying when they hear that.”
We’re here today to talk about a film that uses all of Weaving’s skillset at once – potentially because it was written and directed by her husband Jimmy Warden, who is perhaps best known for scripting the goofy animal-attack movie Cocaine Bear. Borderline is a celebrity stalker romcom slasher film, in which Weaving plays a mononymous Nineties pop star whose home comes under siege by a man convinced they’re meant to be married. A maniacally grinning Ray Nicholson, the genetically blessed son of the legendary Jack, is Weaving’s by-any-means-necessary groom.
Warden wrote the movie for Weaving, but insisted she treat the script just as any other she receives. “We have a good working relationship,” she says. “We can put different hats on – I can be the actress, he can be the director, and then we can put our wife and husband hats on later.”
It helped, too, that their friends Margot Robbie and her husband Tom Ackerley were on board as producers (their company LuckyChap has backed films including Saltburn and the forthcoming Wuthering Heights), and that Warden had written a character for Weaving that she felt so compelled to sink her teeth into. “It reminded me of The King of Comedy,” she says, referencing Martin Scorsese’s prickly 1982 film about mad kidnappers played by Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard who abduct Jerry Lewis’s talkshow host. “And Jimmy perfectly captured the kind of woman that you had to become in order to survive Hollywood in the Nineties,” Weaving adds. “It was like this backwards feminism, this faux feminism, where you were compelled to ‘free your body’ but usually for the male gaze.”
“In order for a woman to be taken seriously, you had to be just so strong,” she continues. “As a young woman, even now, it’s hard to be like…” She drops her voice to a timid whisper. “‘Hey, listen to me,’ you know?”
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
She says she’s a lot more reserved now than she used to be, which confuses her. When she first arrived in Los Angeles in 2014, she was full-speed with confidence. “I’m very grateful for my 20-year-old brain that was like, ‘I can do this, let’s move, let’s go!’ I don’t understand how brazen I was! Now I’d be terrified. There was something about my not-fully-formed frontal cortex that made me feel like I could do anything.”
She suspects it may have had something to do with the ease of her earlier success in Australia. She comes from a creative family – her dad is a filmmaker, her mum an art therapist, and her uncle the Matrix actor Hugo Weaving. Work came fast as a teenager. First she played what she dubs “a bratty kid” on the soap opera Out of the Blue, then another “bratty kid” on (inevitably) Home & Away. “I was just playing myself,” she laughs. But she also had a relatively normal life outside of entertainment.
“Being a young actress in Australia is very different from being a young actress in America,” she thinks. “People I’ve spoken to in the States, for them it was really full-on and all consuming. It takes over your whole life. In Australia, they very much want you to have a childhood. On those TV shows, I would be in a few scenes an episode, maybe I’d have a big storyline every once in a while, but they were very conscious of me going to school, too. It felt like I had the best of both worlds.”
She’s grateful, as well, that her American career has been a slow build, rather than a sudden smash of attention. “Fame wasn’t something I was ever striving for,” she says. “I wanted to be successful, but being really famous never appealed to me. And I’m glad that I’ve not been thrown into the deep end of being hounded by paparazzi or whatever – that just seems so intense and traumatic. Instead I’ve had the time to learn and strategise, and really ask myself, ‘OK, how am I going to handle all of this?’”
It helps that she’s got a network of Australians-in-LA, too. Robbie, yes, but also actors and models such as Teresa Palmer, Phoebe Tonkin and Lara Worthington – they’re on one another’s Instagrams, at one another’s weddings. “I think we’re called the gumnut mafia,” she jokes, alluding to the name given to Olivia Newton-John’s LA support system of Australian natives in the Eighties. “I don’t know why we’re everywhere here!” she says, before positing a couple of theories. “Maybe it’s because we’re all homesick and want to recreate our weird culture? Or maybe it’s because we speak in a very silly way and only other Aussies can understand our weird slang?” And then, as if on cue, she adds: “I’m very grateful for all my ding-a-ling girls out here.”
‘Borderline’ is available on digital platforms now
