While some movie stars wear their injuries and battle scars like badges of honour, Aussie actor Samara Weaving wishes hers was a little more “bad-ass”.
Tom Cruise famously broke his ankle leaping between buildings on Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Daniel Craig suffered a litany of injuries during his stint as James Bond, and Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament during the epic fight scenes on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
By comparison, just before filming the sequel to her 2019 horror hit Ready Or Not, Scream Queen Weaving was left immobilised after putting her back out – while making her bed.
“I guess I have a dead disc in my back and three bulging discs that I just didn’t know about,” she says slightly sheepishly over Zoom call from Los Angeles alongside her Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come co-star Kathryn Newton.
“I wasn’t even doing anything cool – I was just making the bed one day and didn’t get back up. I just hit the ground and then I was in hospital, I had to get an epidural, I was on steroids, it was bananas.
“Two days before we started shooting, the swelling on my spinal cord went down, it was like a miracle.
“And then I could fight people again. I wish I could say it went out doing something bad-ass but it wasn’t at all. I was just picking up a pillow.”
If there was one silver lining to Weaving’s stint in hospital, it gave her a chance to better get to know Newton, who plays her sister in Ready Or Not 2.
The pair had worked together nearly a decade ago on 2017 the Oscar-nominated black comedy crime hit Three Billboards in Ebbing Missouri, but the enforced downtime gave them an opportunity to renew their bond – especially given they knew they would have to spend a fair chunk of the movie literally chained together.
“She made an effort,” the clearly impressed Newton says. “We got our nails done and she was basically bedridden, paralysed, couldn’t walk – her back was out and she did it anyway.”
In the original horror-comedy Ready Or Not, which made nearly ten times its $8.5 million budget and earned a cult following, Weaving played new bride Grace. On her wedding night, Grace discovers that her new family belong to a satanic cult and as part of a deal with the Devil in exchange for their money and power, they are obliged to offer the newcomer up as a human sacrifice.
Grace naturally has other ideas and after a night of extreme carnage – in which her pristine white wedding dress turns red with blood – emerges as the last one standing when the Devil comes to take his due.
Although it’s being released seven years later, the sequel picks up right where the original left off, with Grace inadvertently dragging her sister into a fresh deadly hunt when other elite, entitled families from around the world emerge to fill the cabal’s leadership vacuum left by her late in-laws.
Despite the success of the original, which left a cultural footprint in the form of the growing number of women decked out in bloody wedding dresses for Halloween, Weaving was as surprised as anyone to reprise the role.
“No one thought we would be making a second one,” she says. “But it’s so great that really the fans generated the existence of another one. We all were so excited to get the team back together.”
After filming the first movie in Toronto in the snowy depths of the Canadian winter, Weaving was grateful for a spring shoot this time. But she knew that for better or worse some things would never change thanks to the gory, blood-spattered fight scenes as Grace once again has to fight back against her would-be killers.
“I guess when you are getting covered in goo at 4am, that’s never going to be a great time,” she says with a laugh. “That I wasn’t looking forward to. But then also weirdly I kind of was because we got to do it again. So it comes with the territory.”
Newton, who also has impeccable horror credentials in the genre thanks to her roles in Paranormal Activity 4, Freaky, Lisa Frankenstein and Abigail, was one of the many fans of the genre struck by the image of the blood-spattered Weaving wreaking her revenge in the first film. She was surprised by the level of action required of her on set – “the movie started at an 11 and it never went down” – but despite the high intensity scenes, Newton says she was “just so happy every day”.
Part of that was down to the presence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer star and veteran Scream Queen Sarah Michelle Gellar, to whom Newton says she partly owes her career.
“I was so excited,” Newton says of Gellar, who plays one of murderous elites. “I think I felt something change … the air changed, the world stopped for a moment because I felt like it was a big deal.
“A Grace character doesn’t exist unless there was a Buffy character and then I don’t exist without this as well. I just felt like it was a nice universe coming together. And I mostly just didn’t want to hurt her or break her or anything. But she is tough – there was no sense in acting like that but I was really honoured and excited to meet her.”
After the action of Ready or Not 2, not to mention the rapturous reception it got at the hip SXSW Festival in Texas this week, Weaving is looking forward to some down time. The Adelaide-born 34-year-old is expecting her first child with husband Jimmy Warden, the American writer and director she met on the set of the 2017 black comedy slasher film The Babysitter.
Though Los Angeles is now their base, Weaving says she’s looking forward to a long-overdue trip back home in the coming months.
“I’m hoping to be there maybe July and just see all my family and jump in that ocean,” Weaving says wistfully. “I really miss Australia so much.”
As to whether her firstborn is to be brought up very much in touch with her Aussie roots, Weaving says “absolutely, I won’t have it any other way”, before realising. “Oh my God – is she going to have an American accent?”
“It’s going to happen,” interjects Newton.
“It will won’t it?,” Weaving agrees. “Damn it. I’ll have to give her lessons.”
Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come is in cinemas now.