Samara Weaving Has Transcended the Modern Scream Queen

A beautiful blonde woman, her hair streaked with blood, has been incapacitated by her captor. Her face speaks to the expected panic and fear of the moment, but also at the simmering rage barely concealed beneath–the blood-pounding drive for freedom, for karmic reprisal. A delusional psychopath has put her in this situation, pressed her into a desperate fight for survival. And because this is a Samara Weaving movie, you can bet that the last thing the guy will probably hear is her character’s ululating scream reverberating through his skull as she caves it in.

Technically, that’s a description of the trailer for Weaving’s upcoming thriller Borderline, in theaters on March 14. But it could also stand in well enough as a reference to 2019’s Ready or Not, or last year’s Azrael, films that likewise have pitted the Aussie actress against a collection of reprehensible jerks or psycho cultists who want her dead. Though of course, she’s also been the one doing the murderous scheming as well–look no further than The Babysitter and its sequel, or the anarchic, fuck-the-system glee of 2017’s Mayhem. Regardless of what side of the knife she’s ultimately on, Samara Weaving has carved herself out a niche as one of the horror/thriller genre’s most accomplished and dynamic scream queens in the span of the last decade … but she’s also so much more. With elite comedic chops, a mastery of her voice and an ever-present willingness to showcase vulnerability, even when it involves making herself the butt of the joke, Weaving has proven herself an exceptional talent outside of any boundaries of genre. All the same: No one screams quite like she does.

Contrary to what one might imagine, Samara Weaving didn’t exactly arrive in the U.S. as an experienced, ready-made genre star. Her Australian career through her early 20s had been typified by drama and especially by melodrama, with Weaving starring on multiple seasons of the indefatigable Aussie soap opera series Home and Away, in addition to various thrillers, crime films and dramas. She first dipped a toe into outright horror (or horror comedy) waters with a guest shot in several episodes of Starz’s Ash vs. Evil Dead in 2015, which may have served as a springboard into a duo of 2017 film roles that would effectively announce her as a newly minted scream queen to Hollywood casting directors: Mayhem and The Babysitter. The latter Netflix film in particular is likely where many American genre geeks truly took note of Weaving for the first time: It’s a bit hard to miss her as the titular character splashed across the poster. It was the first widely seen showcase for the kind of bloody mischief with which she would soon become associated, playing a seemingly perfect girl-next-door who is, in reality, the leader of a Satanic cult. She reprised the role, albeit briefly, alongside another budding scream queen (Jenna Ortega) in 2020 sequel The Babysitter: Killer Queen.

If there’s one film that represents the finest showcase to date of Weaving’s horror-centric talents, however, it’s pretty clearly 2019’s Ready or Not. This is a true star vehicle, a film built from the ground up as a showcase for a twentysomething actress taking a leap into genuine stardom. Radio Silence directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (of 2022’s Scream, leading to her appearance in 2023’s Scream VI) were able to for the first time fully capture the je ne sais quoi of what makes Weaving so appealing in these roles, not as a scene-stealing supporting player but as the unquestioned lead. On one side: An extended clan of fabulously wealthy, secret devil worshipers, bound by a Faustian bargain to sacrifice an unlucky new bride marrying into the family. And on the other: Weaving’s Grace, a woman without family who has finally seemed to obtain everything that’s ever been missing from her life, only to see her happiest day descend into a deadly midnight game of hide and seek. Either the family will succeed in killing Weaving, extending their prosperous line, or she’ll be forced to carve a path through all of her new in-laws to obtain the freedom she took for granted only 24 hours earlier.

Ready or Not plays to Weaving’s strengths–among them, her skillful feel for how big or small to play up a reaction, while having the ability to modulate her intensity on the fly, ramping up and down with effortless ease. She’s a performer who knows when to go all out, to play up a reaction to the cheap seats, to push the pedal to the metal with bug-eyed intensity. But critically, she also knows when a far more effective reaction would be to defy the expected big beat and instead undersell a line read, as in her almost disinterested sounding “fuck,” after witnessing the entire le Domas family exploded into a fine mist of blood and viscera, and spying the devil himself nodding in her direction with inescapable approval. The woman has had a long day; she’s not interested in dealing with any more of this diabolical shit, thank you very much. Her muted reaction gets a much bigger laugh than a histrionic response would have, and Weaving is all about maximizing the humor found in any given horror script.

But when it comes time to scream … well, we’ve already said it, but nobody does it better. A scream in a horror movie can communicate a lot of things. Fear and shock, obviously–that’s a given. A scream can convey terror, or anguish, resentment, sorrow or anger. Samara Weaving’s screams hit all those notes at various times, but her specialty is primal rage. Nobody packs righteous fury into a scream like she does in a film like Ready or Not or Azrael. She doesn’t just scream; she ROARS. She bellows. Her screams are sonically unique and frequently weird as hell–they often have what is basically a built-in vibrato to them, lending them an unearthly, almost musical quality. Just listen to some of the wailing sounds that come out of her in the last few minutes of Ready or Not, before its grand guignol conclusion. A personal favorite? That would be the scream she hits at the conclusion of an exasperated, profanity-laden rant in Ready or Not when a car full of rich strangers sees her bloodied form on the side of the road and elects to keep driving rather than offering to help. This is a moment of pure pressure release: After thinking she’s about to escape, her rage has hit critical mass, and if she doesn’t hit that switch to vent it, the lady is going to detonate. You can see the smallest amount of relief on her face after she allows it to escape her body.

With that said, despite the actress having proven her chops in the genre time and time again at this point, a perfect heroine to clamp her teeth down on the jugular of a corrupt world, it would genuinely be a shame if Samara Weaving ended up relegated to primarily horror or genre-adjacent roles for the rest of her career. I don’t think this will be the case, as her eclectic leading and supporting credits in recent years have already included everything from Chevalier and Bill & Ted Face the Music to Snake Eyes, Babylon, Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood or Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers. But there are still too many viewers who recognize Weaving solely for those scream queen roles, who aren’t familiar with every facet of versatility she’s more than capable of bringing to the table.

She is, to begin with, a truly gifted comedic performer in particular. Look at the way she parts the dour atmosphere in a few small but uplifting moments of a film like 2017’s Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, injecting some youthful hesitance into a grumbling drama about calcifying grievances. In a film without many punchlines, she scores big laughs with pretty much everything that comes out of her mouth. Ditto her work on Nine Perfect Strangers, playing a seemingly vapid, image-obsessed influencer who is in reality deeply insecure in her makeup-caked skin. That character seems like the kind of success symbol who appears to have everything that the modern, social media-obsessed woman might crave, but she spends the entire series instead showing off the intensely awkward social dynamic she’s successfully compartmentalized and hidden away from her online fans. She’s a person desperate for love and validation from her own husband, a man she doesn’t trust is genuinely interested in her, despite looking like she just stepped out of the pages of a fitness magazine.

And it’s this vulnerability, a particular willingness to add an apprehensive insecurity to her performances, that has typified Samara Weaving’s depth as an actress. Given that, it’s interesting how she’s so often been compared to the likes of Margot Robbie over the years, their faces lined up next to each other in memes as supposed celebrity doppelgangers, likely in no small part because they’re both blonde Australian actresses separated by only a year in age. In truth, Weaving is quite clearly a beautiful woman, but she possesses a face with more idiosyncrasies than that of Robbie, whose visage is practically Hollywood shorthand for “an impossibly beautiful person,” which itself led to a memorable Barbie joke about her casting. Case in point: Where Robbie’s smile curves up a bit more, making it look more warm, Weaving’s stops a bit short or twitches down, imbuing it with the perception of hesitation or uncertainty. Where Robbie is symmetrical and flawless to a degree that is almost uncanny, Weaving is just that little bit more angular … almost gaunt at times, particularly in a show like Nine Perfect Strangers where her character has obsessively pushed herself to painful lengths for her physical appearance, to her own detriment. It’s the infinitesimal differences that add up–more prominent teeth, slightly different lips–to become bigger differences. Robbie and Weaving have always been in the same orbit, and they hilariously collide on screen in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit in Babylon, but they never should have been put forward as a dyad in the first place. It’s the differences that make them each distinctive personas.

And in Weaving’s case, the idiosyncrasies are a boon rather than some kind of hindrance, making for more nuanced performances in characters that could simply have been typecast as “hot blonde woman.” It’s one of her signature traits as a performer: While portraying someone the screenplay recognizes as beautiful, Weaving infuses that person with a distinct sense of self doubt. Her characters have the bearing of someone who didn’t grow up constantly being praised for their appearance–they’re more like gawky kids who have consciously molded themselves to reach the goal of being accepted among the high society beautiful people, and inherently distrust their station as a result. Her characters can’t accept that they’re welcome in the circles in which they run, suffering from the same sense of imposter syndrome that is so familiar to many of us in the audience. It all helps the average Samara Weaving character, like Grace of Ready or Not, feel more relatable to the audience than so many similarly beautiful protagonists do. Just look at the way she adorably snorts every time she laughs in that film, a subtle hint of the “uncultured” background she’s leaving behind as she’s intended to be integrated into a new, upper crust echelon. It’s all part of her unique screen presence.

Today, Samara Weaving is 33, and although she’s still clearly dabbling in the genre waters given the about-to-release Borderline, a film that sees her 1990s pop star character taken hostage by an obsessed fan played by rising nepo baby Ray Nicholson, one wonders if the phase of her career that gave us so many stand-out scream queen performances might be nearing its natural end. Rarely does an actress continue to be stalked by madmen and beasts into her mid-30s and beyond, although there are certainly plenty of other avenues in which the career of a horror icon can continue to evolve. It’s possible that we still have decades of her reverberating screams ahead of us, and I certainly wouldn’t complain if that was the case. But at the same time, I hope that Weaving is able to continue broadening her oeuvre as she already has. I hope that her prodigious comedic talent and impeccable timing is recognized by casting directors who put her front-and-center as the lead in a feature film comedy at some point. I hope that she’s given enough weighty dramatic material to take home some awards show hardware. I want to see all of those movies. She’s got the talent to do it all, in addition to breaking every item in a china hutch with one of her shrieks. How many other performers can say that?

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.