“So elegant”: Samara Weaving names the greatest actor in cinema history
As much as it ιs a country full of absolutely terrifying things that can kill you, plus you have to fly on a plane for about 48 straight hours to get there, you can’t fault Australia for producing very good blonde actors in their 30s who look practically identical.
First, we had Margot Robbie, who is amazing in everything, and now we have her doppelgänger, Samara Weaving, who is becoming the ‘scream queen’ to end them all.
This year will see Weaving navigate all kinds of bloody carnage thanks to her sequel to the cult hit Ready or Not from 2019, which turned out to be an unexpected box office smash, bringing in ten times its fairly meagre budget at the box office, but even that was far from her first brush with pointy sharp things wielded by maniacs that can hurt a lot.
Once she’d made her way over from ‘Down Under’ after following the de rigeur antipodean tradition of either being in Home and Away and/or Neighbours, Weaving landed a role in the Ash vs Evil Dead series in 2015 and followed it up in the Netflix retro-slasher The Babysitter two years later, via a small part in the fantastic Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. More claret-spilling followed with the frankly insane Guns Akimbo starring former boy wizard Daniel Radcliffe, before Weaving made a Babysitter sequel in 2020.
By now, she was very much on the minds of casting directors and after making an appearance alongside Robbie in Babylon, she ended up where perhaps she was always destined to, the Scream franchise, as she lined up for the sixth instalment of the classic ‘90s teen horror.
Now, although she’s still going to be staying true to her roots with Ready or Not 2 and a gory comedy with Jason Segel called Over Your Dead Body, she is also going to be doing more mainstream drama, including an expose of the Playboy brand called Down the Rabbit Hole and a TV series about a news reporter called Little Sky.
She will no doubt be looking to channel the work of the actress she considers the greatest Hollywood star of all time, telling Interview magazine when asked, “I think Ingrid Bergman. I watched a lot of old film. My dad has a PhD in film noir, so we watched a lot of noir films, and I always loved Ingrid Bergman and her physicality. She’s so relaxed and so elegant at the same time with her sort of cheekiness.”
Weaving would no doubt have been happy to read some comparisons when Ready or Not was released with Begman’s performance in the 1944 thriller Gaslight, in which she played a young woman being manipulated by her husband into thinking she has gone insane. Bergman won the first of her three Academy Awards for the film, which was adapted from a popular play from the late 1930s.
Somewhat surprisingly, despite seven Oscar nominations in her long career, the one film that Bergman wasn’t nominated for was the one for which she will best be remembered, 1942’s Casablanca, opposite Humphrey Bogart.
Weaving, meanwhile, will also be seen this year in Carolina Caroline, a thriller co-starring Kyle Gallner, who appeared in Smile, its sequel, and the fantastic horror Strange Darling from 2023.
