Samara Weaving on Accidentally Becoming a Scream Queen, the Advice She Got From Nicole Kidman, and Thrilling Her Inner Five-Year-Old

Weaving’s family moved around a lot during her early childhood, spending time in Italy, Indonesia, and ultimately Australia, where she attended school from the age of 13. Amid all the travel, she found comfort in television and films. “There was stability and safety in watching the same shows everywhere I go,” Weaving explains. “I would sit in our little den, and me and Dad would watch Friends when he came home from work. We couldn’t watch it on cable because it was Indonesia, so he bought a box set with Indonesian subtitles.” Other favorites were John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (“I watched that every day for a week”) and Jason Reitman’s Juno.

Film also runs in the family: Her father is a filmmaker and now the artistic director of the Canberra International Film Festival, and her uncle, Hugo Weaving, is an acclaimed English actor.

Though Canberra was a small town—“no glitz and glam,” as Weaving puts it—that foundation led to her first auditions in her teens; to a long arc on Home and Away, the Australian soap opera that launched the careers of actors like Chris Hemsworth, Heath Ledger, and Naomi Watts; and to some early modeling gigs. She built up the courage to move to Los Angeles in 2013, at the age of 21, and commit herself to acting: “I was naive, and that really worked in my favor,” she says now. “I didn’t think, Oh, this could go badly. My frontal lobe had not developed yet.”

Looking back on that period, Weaving wishes she’d held on to that bravery, that youthful confidence, more tightly. Then again, it hasn’t entirely gone away: While the horror films keep calling, her hope is also to find more films, roles, and environments that challenge her acting abilities. When Weaving was working with Nicole Kidman on season one of Nine Perfect Strangers, the Hulu limited series based on Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, the latter Aussie actress shared a key anecdote: “She said that she was working with a DP, and he was shooting over her shoulder. She naturally cheated out so that her face would be on camera. And he went, ‘No, no, let the audience wonder what you’re thinking,’” Weaving shares. “I loved that.”