Published Jun 2, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT
Samara Weaving’s next starring role is just the latest proof that being a Scream Queen isn’t holding her back from pursuing new challenges.
Samara Weaving can't really explain why she's been all over your movie screens this year.
The Australian actress has three features releasing in 2026, all starring roles. Two have already opened: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, the sequel to her breakout horror hit from 2019, released in theaters on March 20, and Over Your Dead Body, her action-comedy with Jason Segel about a couple who have each separately decided to murder their spouse over the same weekend getaway, followed a month later on April 24. Her third, the romantic heist thriller Carolina Caroline, is set for this Friday, June 5, after having premiered at Toronto last fall.
In a sit-down interview with ScreenRant ahead of Carolina Caroline's release, Weaving laughed off the idea that there's any connective tissue between these three movies. The bunched scheduling is just one of those Hollywood coincidences. "I think it was really like, 'When it rains, it pours.'"
All these projects came in and I sort of disappeared for a few years and worked on those, and then it just happened that all three came out in the space of [a few] months. I got really lucky. But there wasn't really any connective thread. I just really responded to all three of them.
But there are a few problems with her version of events. Firstly, since making the jump to the American film industry over a decade ago, she's never really disappeared. In fact, she's had multi-film years in that span more often than she hasn't. You'd have to go back to 2018 to find a year without a new Samara Weaving movie – and that's because you could find her on TV instead.
Secondly, her recent run is hardly luck. She established herself in horror fairly quickly and has been crowned one of her generation's Scream Queens, a label she embraces: "Come on, who doesn't want to be a queen?" But she's also a versatile performer, and filmmakers have found no shortage of ways to cast her. She's appeared in everything from period dramas to action comedies, as comfortable blending into an ensemble as she is carrying a movie herself.
She's got the talent, and she's put in the work. Leading three movies in one year was only a matter of time.
Samara Weaving's Love Of Acting Started Early
Even if all three projects crossed her desk as unexpected surprises, it's not entirely true that there's no connection between them. They're all audience-friendly entertainment with a genre twist – something that can describe much of Samara Weaving's career so far. And that taste of hers has deep roots.
The acting bug bit early. "I was really shy as a kid, and we moved around a lot growing up," she recalled. "I wouldn't talk to other kids when I'd start a new school, so my parents put me in an acting class at the new school to kind of help me get out of my shell. And I think there was something about, 'Oh, I don't have to be myself, necessarily, I can play make-believe,' that I really fell in love with."
I think I still do have that childish love for it. Because at the end of the day, we're just dressing up and playing make-believe. You know what I mean? It is quite a sweet, childish thing to do. And I try to remind myself that, oh, I get to do that for a living. That's the best.
She still remembers her first-ever role, cast against type in her school's Christmas play. It may even explain her talent for winking humor.
"I was like, I don't know, five or six. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed little lady. And I played the Grinch." She pulled a face. "I should find the footage. Me trying to be really scary... [Laughs] Just not happening."
More revealing is the movie that first had her wishing she could make them, which came just a few years later: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. "I was obsessed with that movie growing up," she told us, her smile bright and wide. "I remember being like, "I think I want to do this... How do I get involved?"
It's no surprise the 2003 Gore Verbinski film that launched a fleet of sequels is what planted the seed of her film career. It's as pure a distillation of fun as Hollywood ever produced, combining action, horror, comedy, and romance into one swashbuckling adventure. Put all the choices she's made together, and it starts to look like Weaving has always been working toward becoming the kind of movie star we trust to deliver a good time, no matter the genre. 2026 is just that seed bearing fruit.
A Career Launched By Horror That Just Keeps Expanding
Weaving's path began with years on Australian television, starting as a teenager – you can count her among the many Aussie stars working in the US who came through one of the country's soap operas, in her case Home and Away – but the horror genre would become her big launchpad abroad. It didn't take long for the future Scream Queen to realize she had a talent for literal screaming.
I think I was like 19, and I was on the Ash vs. Evil Dead spinoff show. And I remember it was really fast, and they were going, "Okay, now the house is attacking you, and scream!" And I screamed. And I remember as it was happening, I was going, "Oh, this is a good scream. This is really cool."
And I think afterwards people applauded. I was like, "Yeah, again, let's capitalize on this."
And capitalize she did. In 2017, she was noticed for her performances in Mayhem, a rage-virus action thriller, and The Babysitter, a black comedy slasher in which her titular character is part of a satanic cult. Then, in 2019, she starred in Ready or Not, her first lead role in an American feature. Weaving's Grace sees her wedding night turn nightmarish when her husband's wealthy family forces her to play a life-and-death game of hide-and-seek. It proved to be an ideal star vehicle, showing off Weaving's ability to thread the needle of credible action star and funny, relatable character actor.
"Most of my roles, I'm playing someone who's fighting but isn't really a fighter," Weaving said. "In Ready or Not, she's kind of messy, and she's scrappy... I didn't want fights to look too stylized, that she knew what she was doing. It's all kind of like luck and circumstance and gritty.
"It did really well. But it was surprising," she admitted, flashing a gleeful smile. "When we were making it, we didn't know if anyone would like it or not. So we were so excited that people loved it and that we got to make a second one."
"Come on, who doesn't want to be a queen?"
Like any good Scream Queen, Weaving has continued to work in horror. When she had the honor of being a Ghostface opening-sequence victim in 2023's Scream VI, it felt like she was already a genre mainstay. But she doesn't chase those roles – or any roles, for that matter. Experience has taught her that it's better to be open to anything that comes her way.
"I think I've learnt to just be curious and open-minded, because if I try and conjure something that I really want to do next, I'm not looking at scripts that are brilliant that maybe I wouldn't necessarily look at." That's how she wound up with such a distinct 2026 slate. "All three of these... they were all surprising, and I wasn't expecting them. [...] I wasn't looking for those necessarily. So I think now I just keep an open mind and let the material speak for itself."
That approach has taken her to some interesting places, and brought some of her biggest challenges. Her most physically difficult role, despite all the on-sceen punishment, wasn't Grace, but Scarlett in the G.I. Joe spinoff Snake Eyes. "I was playing, oh my gosh, this sort of GI Joe superhero woman. And so, having to learn really choreographed moves... precision fighting and precision shooting, and having to look really professional, was probably the hardest."
For Chevalier, the 2022 biopic about the 18th century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Weaving learned to sing opera. "That was really scary, actually," she recalled. "I'm not a singer. I mean, it was hard."
We had to stretch [my range], the notes I had to hit were so high and so low. And I mean, there was an Italian opera singer who was singing on top of my voice and they kind of meshed the two. But on the day, when we were shooting it, it was just me singing, and it was so scary. Opera singing is hard, let alone in a corset.
For Carolina Caroline, her newest film, she challenged herself once again. She described it to us as her most mentally and emotionally difficult project to date. In it, she shows audiences a new side of what she can do.
Carolina Caroline Gives Samara Weaving One Of Her Best Roles To Date
Carolina Caroline is a potent mix of romance and heist thriller, in which Weaving's Caroline, a small-town Texas girl who's always dreamed of picking up and taking off, meets Kyle Gallner's Oliver, a con-man who makes that dream come true. They fall for each other the moment they meet, with Caroline not only drawn to the thrill of crime, but showing an aptitude for it. Small scams become big scams. Big scams become bank robberies. The brighter and hotter they burn, the closer their world gets to spinning dangerously out of control.
It's a truly compelling role for Weaving. The film hinges on the push-and-pull of wondering whether Caroline is being reeled into this life by Oliver, or actively choosing it herself – perhaps even pushing him deeper than he ever intended to go. To make that happen, director Adam Carter Rehmeier relies on his star's natural on-screen playfulness, which she can shift from innocent to knowing with the smallest change in her performance. The way she plays it, Caroline may not even know the answer for sure.
It's scarier than just being like, 'Yeah, I'm going to run around and fight people.'
"Carolina Caroline was a random script in a bunch of scripts that my team gave me to read over the holidays," Weaving told us. "As like, 'Oh, if you can get to it, great.' And it was like finding gold."
I think I just inhaled it. I read it in like an hour and I couldn't stop thinking about it... It just was like nothing I'd ever done before, and I really loved this character. It reminded me of the sort of nostalgic, love-movie, heist thrillers that I'd seen growing up. And you don't read a lot of scripts like that anymore, and I don't really see a lot of those kinds of movies anymore. So I just couldn't wait to be a part of it. I'm really lucky that it panned out the way it did.
Before reading it, Weaving was unfamiliar with Rehmeier's previous work. Now, she counts his film Dinner in America as one of her favorites. It was clear that she would be in good hands, which was important – even for a seasoned horror actress, playing Caroline was uniquely frightening.
"It's just the most vulnerable character. And Tom Dean, the writer, made such a beautiful arc and I hadn't played..." She paused. "I haven't done a love story before. And so, that was really scary in its own right.
"It was having to trust Kyle – and being so glad and relieved that he's such a good person and that we work the same way – and having to be quite raw and vulnerable, you know? It's scarier than just being like, 'Yeah, I'm going to run around and fight people.'"
Though it leaps easily between crime-thriller fun and touching character drama, the engine of Carolina Caroline is indeed the love story between Caroline and Oliver. As much as Weaving's performance is the movie's lynchpin, if we don't believe in the couple, the whole thing falls apart. But even as they do ever more questionable things, they remain irresistible as a pair.
"I think that's what makes the movie so great," Weaving said. "Tom wrote these characters that could easily be villains, but they're not. They are the heroes, even though they're doing these terrible things." She's also quick to credit Gallner, who brought a quality to Oliver that she not only wasn't expecting, but that she believes was essential.
There was a safety to his performance that was quite unexpected. I think reading the character of a traveling conman, there's a real danger to it, but he almost played so against that, and played it like it's her safe space...
Kyle did such an incredible job. I think in someone else's hands, the role could have gone really in the other direction, but he made him so kind and warm... I can see a lot of dudes being like, "Yo, I'm going to be macho, and I'm going to be the cool, slick guy." But he just was so gentle. He brought such a sweetness to the role that I think was so important, because you really do root for them.
Of course, filming wasn't all serious. Gallner told SR that the two stars had frequent "road trips" while shooting on location in Kentucky, hanging out for an hour or two at a time as he drove them from small town to small town. And as Caroline sinks deeper into a life of crime, she robs banks while wearing a black bob wig – scenes sound like they were as enjoyable to make as they are to watch.
"I loved Edna," she told us when asked about the wig. "We named her Edna after Edna Mode in The Incredibles... Yeah, it was so fun. All of those bank robbing outfits with Edna were 10 out of 10."
But as great as it is to see Weaving channel her action-movie self, what really sets her work in Carolina Caroline apart are the quiet moments. Partway through the film, she shares a showstopping scene with Kyra Sedgwick, who, in Weaving's words, is "like a tornado." The scene took two days to shoot, but despite that, Rehmeier told us he was determined not to "break the scene in half in some way." Each go of it, they filmed the full scene in single, 12-minute takes.
That process, Rehmeier recalled, revealed something quite profound about what Weaving brought to his film.
We started with [Sedgwick] and we shot all of her coverage first, and then we flipped the camera onto Samara. And I can say this, because it was sort of a similar thing to... Dinner in America. There's a scene where the lead actor is going to sing this song in the movie, and we did all of her coverage first. And it was like with Kyra, we did everything on her... It's big, it's dramatic, and she's all over the place, it's tiny, it's large, it's a really masterful scene. But then you flip it, and you get a chance to see what Samara's doing for the first time... she's watching [Sedgwick] and it's just heartbreaking.
And that was cool for me to see because I was just like, I just wasn't even thinking about Sam. I was so focused on [Sedgwick] and watching [her] and being like, "Oh God, this is so good. This is so juicy." And then you flip it, and you see the heartbreak in this girl's eyes, and it's just devastating. And in this scene, the dynamic is such that she's not having to say much. She's listening.
She's a great listener. And that's part of being a great scene partner, and being a value-add to a movie, is knowing how to ride those levels. Sometimes way less is way more.
Samara Weaving, War Movie Hero?
For the moment, Weaving is eager to see Carolina Caroline find its audience. Her final pitch:
"I just think that it is a sexy, horny, emo movie and everyone needs to see it." Looking ahead, despite wanting to stay open to whatever comes her way, there is one dream role she'd really love to see come true.
She's not so drawn to the superhero worlds of Marvel and DC ("Not as much as I should [be], I think"), and while she loves Harry Potter ("That I watch every November, all of them"), she doesn't really see a place for her in the new HBO Max series adaptation. "I don't know if there are a lot of roles for my age bracket – unless it's Bellatrix, and you can't follow Helena Bonham Carter. That's really tough. I could be Rita Skeeter though."
In fact, when asked by SR to name one thing she hasn't done that she'd love to tackle, Weaving wasn't thinking of franchises at all.
"I am such a fan of war movies." Among her off-the-cuff favorites: 1917, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Hurt Locker, and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.
"I'd love to do a World War II movie or something. There are so many stories of the women that were fighting on the front lines that just aren't really told. Like, an epic war movie about a woman? I haven't seen that."
Hopefully, someone in Hollywood can see the vision – a war movie heroine sounds like the ideal combination of every tool in Samara Weaving's toolkit. But whatever she does next, it's sure to be entertaining.
Release Date June 5, 2026
Runtime 105 Minutes
Director Adam Rehmeier
Writers Tom Dean
Producers Eric B. Fleischman, Tim White, Chris Abernathy, Trevor White, Stephen Braun
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Samara Weaving
Caroline Daniels
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English (US) ·