In Over Your Dead Body, a dysfunctional married couple retreats to a secluded cabin to repair their relationship, but each secretly plots to murder the other.
What follows is a chaotic, action-packed, hilarious, and occasionally frightening tale that takes Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) on a journey unlike anything you'd imagine. The cast is rounded out by Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Paul Guilfoyle, and directed by Jorma Taccone (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping).
We recently sat down with Jason (Shrinking) and Samara (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come) to learn more about the love/hate (but mostly hate) relationship their characters have, relying on each other during the movie's action-packed moments, and the fun of exploring Over Your Dead Body's romcom themes.
We also hear from Jason on tackling a very different kind of character, and, not included in the transcript below, is a fun exchange between the actors about one of the movie's funniest scenes (it involves Samara tasering her co-star).
Check out our full interview with Jason and Samara on Over Your Dead Body in the player below.
I would love to know, to begin with, how much fun it was for both of you to play with the quiet and then the very loud disdain that your characters have for each other.
Jason Segel: It's a great question. I think that was the fun of the movie. It always felt like a metaphor to me of relationship counselling, of how you start trying with gritted teeth to say things nicely, and then it explodes. And then realising like, okay, if we're going to stay together, the only way out of this thing is holding each other by the hand and fighting a common enemy. So to me it was really fun, and she was the best partner in the world.
Samara Weaving: Yeah. I based my character — I have a lot of really strong Australian take-no-bullshit kind of gals in my group, and I modelled her off of them because I would just watch how they treat their husbands and be like shut up, just get the thing out of the car, you know.
Jason Segel: What's wrong with their voices?
Samara Weaving: They're just furious. I'm just mad. But yeah, I really like their attitude, so I kind of just copied them. I hope they don't mind me saying that.
Jason Segel: Would they know? Would the friend know?
Samara Weaving: I think if they watch it tonight, they're going to go, 'Is that me?' I'm going to go, 'Yeah, it's faster. I love it.'
Jason, you're left pretty bloodied and battered throughout this one. And obviously, Samara, I know you're no stranger to that kind of gore after films like Ready or Not, but how much did you two have to really rely on each other during those really intense, chaotic, and bloody fight scenes that we see in the film?
Jason Segel: Quite a bit, actually. I think we were really there for each other emotionally. Look, it wasn't the highest budget movie. So it's not like it was very cushy doing these scenes. When we're crawling through mud, it wasn't Hollywood mud. It was just mud. They sprayed some water on some dirt and then had us crawl. It was cool and gritty and hard, and we had each other, and our other co-stars were in the same boat. It required full buy-in from everybody, like we're all here to nail this thing and we had that. We were also kind of sequestered in this little town in Finland. So, you're only there for one reason. It's not like you're going home to your nice house and regretting having to go back to work the next day. You're just there to nail this thing.
Samara Weaving: Yeah. It was like camp.
Jason Segel: Yeah, that's right.
Jason, you've obviously done a lot of amazing comedy work and dramatic work, but when it came to really balancing the laughs with the much darker places you have to take it down during the home invasion side of things, how did you find tackling maybe a little bit of horror and that kind of violence?
Jason Segel: I'm a big Jack Nicholson fan. I always start picking people to kind of steal like an artist, they say. I try to start picking people I'm going to copy. I watched The Shining for this, and there were a couple of other movies, a couple of other performances where I'm like, as long as you make this fun, you can kind of get away with anything. I also feel like I've been doing this a long time. I kind of relied on the fact that people think of me as their best friend or their buddy or something like that. And so I always think I can spend that currency — I can do really, really bad stuff and people will feel like oh she must have really made him mad.
This is a little bit of a twisted romcom in some ways as well. There's a little bit of a love story at the heart of this one, so how much fun was that for you both to tackle that side of things as well as everything else that goes on?
Samara Weaving: That was my favourite part, doing the sort of relationship scenes. I love doing stunts and getting weird and screaming and crying and running around, but there was something just really rewarding about doing sad but funny and intense scenes and with Jason as well. It was the highlight.
Jason Segel: To me, the whole movie is a romcom in a way. I know it's brutal and gory and all that, but to me, the whole movie is about a couple working out their shit. And all of that stuff is kind of a metaphor to me. There's a way to watch the movie, like, oh, this is what it's like to go through trouble in a relationship. You want to kill each other, and you find your way out of it.
Over Your Dead Body arrives in theaters on April 24.