Samara Weaving has spent the last six years watching Ready or Not earn its place in the pantheon of little movies that could. The 2019 horror comedy was a small, bloody affair, so small that Weaving’s manager was handing out free tickets at The Grove just to get people in the theater. In the time since, the movie, about a bride who is hunted by her new husband’s murderous family as part of a deadly game, has become a modern horror touchstone, which means that a sequel is inevitable. Cut to six years later and a very pregnant Weaving is promoting Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which picks up seconds after the first movie left off, and adds new cast members like Kathryn Newton (who plays Weaving’s estranged sister) and Sarah Michelle Gellar, another genre queen who couldn’t wait to talk to Weaving about doing your own stunts, what it actually takes to survive a horror movie, and why neither of them will answer to “final girl.”
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SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR: I have a new computer and I totally can’t figure out how it works.
SAMARA WEAVING: I’m allergic to technology, I think.
GELLAR: I always call Freddie [Prinze Jr.] a Luddite and he hates when I say that, but it’s actually the definition. If he comes near my stuff, it breaks.
WEAVING: I’m the Luddite. [Laughs]
GELLAR: I’m probably the worst person to do this because I’ll probably ask nothing anyone is interested in, and just what I want to ask you.
WEAVING: I want to ask you a million questions.
GELLAR: I’m going to start by saying that this film only works because you are so great in it. To be able to balance the ridiculousness and the comedy of it, but to have the gravitas, is what makes it work.
WEAVING: That’s so nice.
GELLAR: It’s literally just the truth. We all get to be so incredibly ridiculous and you have to always play everything for real. And yet, you still somehow manage to get laughs, which is really to your credit of why you’re such a superstar in these films. And physically what you put yourself through. My favorite story was in the first movie that you lost your deposit on your rental because of all the blood. You literally stained the apartment.
WEAVING: The apartment was pink by the time I left.
GELLAR: How did it feel the first time you zipped that dress back on, aside from grossness?
WEAVING: I have to give credit where credit’s due. The writers wrote such a grounded woman. They got that tone so right in the script because these insane characters come in for just the right amount of time, make the audience take a deep breath and laugh, and then you can go right back into the stakes of it all. You guys made my job so easy/hard because—
GELLAR: We’re ridiculous.
WEAVING: But it’s so fun, and my job is to be an audience member and just react. Going back to your question, the dress. In the fitting I was a bit loopy, but I put the dress on and came out, and we were all weirdly emotional because I was like, “Oh, she’s back.” I was also struggling with, “What is this character again? It’s been six years, what am I doing?” The power of costume, you put that thing back on and you’re like, “Oh yeah, this brings back memories and I feel her.” But also, we didn’t know what we were making on the first one.
GELLAR: I can imagine.
WEAVING: We were having a good time, but the tone was so strange and everyone was being so weird and it was such a small budget. We didn’t know if anyone was going to watch it. My manager was running around The Grove, handing out free tickets to strangers. The fact that six years later we have the privilege to make another one was so nice because we had such a good time. Otherwise, why would you put yourself through this craziness again?
GELLAR: I know what it feels like to have something that you love, that you don’t know if anyone’s going to see, and then it gets legs and keeps going. Those are the ones that mean the most as an actor. It doesn’t matter who I mention Ready or Not to, they’re all like, “Oh my god, I love that film.” People are still discovering it and seeing it for the first time. How does that feel?
WEAVING: It must be the same with Buffy, right? There’s a new generation that are discovering and falling in love with it. The fact that I get to do it again because people love it as much as I do, is so touching and great.
GELLAR: I tell everyone that this movie is a love letter to all the fans that love the first one. We’re just going to go farther, do more, be more ridiculous.
WEAVING: We have a bigger budget, you guys.
GELLAR: We should acknowledge that we had a bigger budget, but not a big budget. When I came on, I was actually surprised, because of the success of the first one, how lean they still wanted to make this one. What I learned from it was that’s how [the filmmaking collective] Radio Silence works best, when it’s all of us putting in all that effort. It’s almost like a way of weeding out people who don’t want to be there.
WEAVING: No ding dongs, we don’t have time.
GELLAR: [Laughs] There’s no time, there’s no money. But in hindsight, I understand why, because it let us have the freedom to make the movie the way we all wanted to.
WEAVING: It feels like camp. You just have to get down and dirty.
GELLAR: I would also be remiss if I didn’t talk about you and Kathryn [Newton], because my husband and I went to go see the movie and Freddie hadn’t read it.
WEAVING: It still blows my mind that SMG and Freddie Prinze Jr. are like, “Yeah, we just saw your movie.” The teenager in me has to chill out a little bit.
GELLAR: [Laughs] Totally fair. The chemistry between the two of you is unreal. I always tell people, you go into a film and whoever your partner is, you can love someone off camera and have no chemistry on film, you can hate someone and have all the chemistry in the world. You guys didn’t know each other before?
WEAVING: Well, that was Tyler and Matt playing Cupid. They had her in mind the whole time.
GELLAR: Right, because they did Abigail.
WEAVING: So they invited Kathryn to a screening of Ready Or Not, and they were like, “Guys, meet.” We’d met briefly at something a million years ago, and she was just as weird and as awkward as me, and we very quickly fell into this sisterly relationship where she’s asking me for advice with boys and—
GELLAR: Oh, she wasn’t asking you for advice. You were basically ghostwriting all of her texts.
WEAVING: [Laughs] Yeah, I was. And then I would be texting boys about Harry Potter, and then I’d go, “Kathryn, do you know what I’m talking about?” She’s like, “I’ve never watched Harry Potter in my life.” “Well, you’re going to go on this date and not know what I’m talking about.”
GELLAR: Why have we not sat her down to watch all of the brilliant Harry Potters? That’s another conversation.
WEAVING: Yes.
GELLAR: I think people would be surprised because before I met you, I thought of you as this ridiculously stunning Australian bombshell. I was like, “I wonder what she’s going to be like?” It’s such a pleasant surprise when people meet you, because you’re not who people think you’re going to be. You’re even better. You’re this weird gamer nerd. We would try to get you to go out and you’d be like, “I’ve got a raid tonight.”
WEAVING: Yeah, “I’ve got Assassin’s Creed, man.”
GELLAR: Is that something that helps you unwind?
WEAVING: Yeah, I think I’m quite an introvert. The nature of this job and the culture that we are in, we’re sort of a slave to extrovertism, so I want to make sure that when I’m at work, I’m of service to everyone. If I’m in a grumpy mood, I know that it has a trickle-down effect.
GELLAR: Are we allowed to talk about scenes? Because I have a favorite scene in this movie and it wasn’t a scene I was in, but it was a scene I had the pleasure of watching. Let’s just call it the two bride scene.
WEAVING: Oh, my. Isn’t it phenomenal?
GELLAR: It is. Honestly, I’ve never been in a theater where I literally wanted to ask the projectionist to please rewind like I was at home on my couch. Shawn and I, we were deceased.
WEAVING: It was so fun. The stunt team went above and beyond. They had to do a lot of the heavy lifting because I couldn’t.
GELLAR: Hold on, hold on. No one loves a stunt team more than I do, but let’s talk about how many of the stunts you did yourself. It was actually really funny because, people who see the movie, there was no stunts for Ursula really in the script. And then they kept talking about my fight with you. And I’m like, “What are they talking about?” I didn’t realize they were writing one for us.
WEAVING: Oh yeah, we can’t have Gellar do a movie and not have a fight.
GELLAR: It was my last day and they literally taught it to us 30 seconds before we went out there. And I’m used to it, that’s been my life, but let’s talk about how great you are. I watched that bride scene and I was the one behind the monitor, going, “Did they hurt her?” You were taking hit after hit. Yes, there was a stunt team, but you do such a huge portion of it.
WEAVING: It’s fun though, isn’t it?
GELLAR: It’s fun until you’re really hurting. You always hit that one moment where it’s like, “I went too far.” But what’s funny was, in this film, it didn’t happen in our big fight sequence. I was fine after ours. It was a different scene where I woke up the next day and I was like, “I need a massage or I can’t move my neck.”
WEAVING: Yeah, I think it was Harrison Ford who was like, “Oh, stunts, you don’t get hurt.” It’s like, “No.”
GELLAR: Oh, you do. Did you find it easier or harder to leave Grace this time?
WEAVING: That’s a really interesting question. I always process things about two weeks later, especially after a job. I call it the actor’s hangover. I always get sick.
GELLAR: Oh, everybody gets sick. The second they say wrap, you get sick.
WEAVING: You get sick because your body’s just going, “Don’t get sick now. Stay with it.” And then you crumble and break. But two weeks later, it’s “I miss people, I miss Toronto. That set was really fun.” I don’t know if it’s necessarily the character, but I get attached to all you ding-dongs.
GELLAR: On a movie like this that’s so intense, a lot of times between takes, everyone goes to their corners and does whatever their thing is. I always have a book, some people sew, some people have their games, you always had a board game out. But I kept finding us trying to get closer together which is so rare.
WEAVING: We’d all just be giggling. And I think you need that a little bit on a set like this, especially if everyone’s cool.
GELLAR: What do you think makes Grace different from other final girls?
WEAVING: Oh, that’s hard.
GELLAR: I get asked this a lot too, and that term wasn’t around when I started. I almost feel like it needs to be rebranded because final girl makes other women seem unsuccessful. And you’re so much more than just a final girl. I feel like it should be survivalist.
WEAVING: At least final woman, we’re not young [Laughs]. It is quite dismissive, isn’t it? It would never be final boy.
GELLAR: Right, no one ever said to Bruce Willis, “How does it feel to be the final boy?” You and I are going to start the rebranding. I think it’s survivalist.
WEAVING: It’s survivalist. I think you learn from all of the previous women who’ve done it before, don’t you? And then it’s really like, “Okay, how can I have a different take on this story?” And a lot of that is to do with the writers and directors, and we all plan together.
GELLAR: We should talk about your trailer too, how you literally had to map everything out.
WEAVING: I map it all out, and then throw it away. But I really wanted to avoid playing fear the same in every scene, because as an audience member, when I see fear being played the same, it gets boring for me. And I wanted to have a really clear fear arc, if you will. So I wanted her to start out in denial where it’s real shock and almost disassociating from it, and then getting true terror and the reality of it has sunken in.
GELLAR: It just goes to show why you are so great in this film, because it can be very easy to just go in and it’s all there on the page. But you are so thoughtful into what the audience is going to see, who Grace is. And you get to this stuff when people ask those dumb final girl questions or horror, this and that. It’s like this is the one genre where we really get the chance to shine as women. We can be the strongest, we can be the funniest, the fastest, that we’re not just the girlfriend. And this movie in particular really shows it because this is a love story between two women. It’s a love story about family and sisters and belonging. And when you talk about her being a wolf and how all she wants is to have that family and how this is a discovery of the family was there all along, but she didn’t know how to access that.
WEAVING: Yeah. I think I’m actually in awe of actors that can show up and have kind of read it a few times and deliver. And it’s so annoying when they’re like, “How are you so good? You literally just read it yesterday.”
GELLAR: I would also be remiss not to talk about the opening. I am so in awe of you in the opening because this is six years later, but the movie picks up one second after the first one. You have to literally go back to that exact spot and it’s seamless. How was that?
WEAVING: Yeah. It was almost like a somatic experience where I was just in the space that was so similar that it felt like I’d done this before. And the costume truly was the biggest trigger. And they had built the set and it was kind of the same, but kind of different. It was really surreal. It was just, thank god I hadn’t changed too much.
GELLAR: Yeah, you didn’t get a new face. [Laughs] Well, I can’t wait for everyone to see you in this movie because there’s already this expectation, and you blow it out of the water. I got to see it a couple weeks ago and I can’t wait to see it with an audience.
WEAVING: I’m so excited. Are you coming to South By?
GELLAR: Are you coming to South By? Am I delivering a child?
WEAVING: I think you will be delivering a child.
GELLAR: Yes!
WEAVING: I think we can make it work.
