Becoming Shiv: Inside story of how Adelaide drama student Sarah Snook became a megastar
How did an Adelaide girl end up in one of the biggest TV shows in the world? Here’s how Sarah Snook conquered Hollywood – and the huge role she’s glad she never got.
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“Reminds me of Cate Blanchett”, NIDA’s then head of acting, Tony Knight, wrote in his notes when Adelaide schoolgirl Sarah Snook auditioned for him in Adelaide in the early 2000s. Knight remembers the audition well because he saw her twice before she was accepted into the prestigious national institution.
“I think she was still at Scotch (College) when she auditioned the first time and it was one of those situations where she was just too young – but please, come back and see us again,” says Knight who now lives in Port Willunga, south of Adelaide.
“And she did, and it will be on her audition notes because I wrote it down. Reminds me of Cate Blanchett.”
Knight made the comparison with the double-Oscar winning Australian star not on ability, which was still unproven, but on the stage presence the luminous Snook brought to her audition.
“It’s the radiance she has, I mean, not just the beautiful skin and eyes and that sort of stuff, but, like Cate, she just radiates intelligence and warmth,” says Knight, who taught at NIDA for more than 20 years and whose students included Blanchett.
“There is a generous spirit. Also, it’s the smartness. You know you are dealing with someone who is highly intelligent.”
THE BIG BREAK
Snook’s phenomenal success could never have been foreseen.
From a working Australian actor with a good resume, Snook since 2016 has grown into a touchstone of popular culture through her role as Shiv Roy in Succession, the acclaimed HBO series about a dysfunctional, billionaire media family.
Playing the alternately ambitious, lost, spoiled, cynical and overlooked daughter of a powerful media baron, she looks odds on to win her first Emmy in this year’s awards, rescheduled for January 16 next year because of the Hollywood writer’s strike.
Succession, about the bitter rivalries between three siblings over who gets to inherit the power behind the fictional Waystar global empire, has a stunning 27 nominations with Snook in the running for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.
The final season includes a standout performance by her in the episode in which she gets the news on a boat at her brother’s wedding that their father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) has died. She portrayed her devastation so movingly that both the writer and director were brought to tears during filming, even though they knew the material.
One of her fellow actors, Alan Ruck, who played Connor, the older brother whose wedding day it was, said later he was nervous about summoning the emotion he needed to get through his scenes. Then on the day of filming, Snook arrived and made it easy.
“I was taught a long time ago that you just have to accept the fact that your performance is going to come from all the other characters around you, if you’re just open to what is going on,” Ruck said later.
“And when Sarah came in to tell me (Logan was dead), and Sarah was a puddle, you know, then it was just like ‘game over’. You don’t have to act.”
She has become such an international star that Snook’s next job will take her back to her theatre roots as the big name hired to pull in audiences to a stage production in London’s West End.
The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which opens in February, is built around the complex technical wizardry that Adelaide audiences experienced in the 2022 Adelaide Festival with Eryn Jean Norvill in the lead.
It is a highly demanding one-woman show and Snook will play 26 characters over nearly two hours.
THE EARLY YEARS
Her teachers in Adelaide and at NIDA saw potential in her, but none of them predicted this. Her acting mentor and guide through her school years, Andrew Jefferis, who ran the Academy acting school out of Scotch College, said Snook stood out from the moment he saw her, as a St John’s Grammar in Belair student, auditioning for a scholarship.
“She got the scholarship immediately I looked at her. She was a little kid, like Pippi Longstocking,” says Jefferis, whose former drama students include Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong.
“I picked her straight away from the first intake and I didn’t worry about her after that.”
The repertoire at Scotch, which trained students from Scotch and elsewhere, varied from Chekhov to Jesus Christ Superstar and Snook was cast in major and minor roles, never questioning what she was asked to do.
When she was 15, he put her in with 18 and 19 year-olds and when it came to casting, they all wanted to know what Snook was going to do so they could fit in around her.
“Everybody understood that she was just different but it never came through in the way I treated her because she’s not like that,” says Jefferis, who went on to teach drama at Annesley College.
“She was just in another category of understanding her role and chasing it, in her eyes, and in the way she’d play it.”
Once when he was making a student film and needed a forest, he took students to his place in the Adelaide Hills.
Snook ran down the paddock and shot straight up the tallest pine tree. She was about 12 or 13 at the time and she was 20m up in the air.
“Jeffo, this is a really good climbing tree,” she yelled down at him. “We called it Sarah’s tree, it’s still there,” he says.
Snook was direct in her approach to acting, asking multiple questions to help understand a character and adapting a role in unexpected ways.
“I don’t want to eulogise or praise her too much, and she wasn’t the strongest character actor I had because she didn’t like mimicry, although she could do it,” Jefferis says.
“But Sarah always has the focus because people can’t take their eyes off this person who changes, not in a big way, but imperceptibly.”
She also sings, on top of everything else.
“She was pretty good at it even though it wasn’t her strength, but I remember putting her in a musical and she sang really well,” he says.
Getting Snook in front of NIDA, the Sydney-based national drama school whose past students include Mel Gibson, Judy Davis and Baz Luhrmann, was always part of the plan.
Jefferis, who hosted NIDA summer schools and vacation workshops, began telling Snook when she was in Year 7 and 8 that she needed to set her sights on getting in.
“There was never any question,” he says.
ON HER WAY UP
Once at NIDA, Snook took her place as one of an elite group of students representing the national cream of the crop.
She worked hard but she was just one among other very talented actors, some of whom have significant careers, among them Ryan Corr (Wolf Creek, Holding the Man) who was a year behind her, and from her year Ash Ricardo (Offspring) and Miranda Tapsell who was cast in The Sapphires four years after graduating.
“She was in a very exceptional year when you look at it,” says Knight, who is doing a PhD on a Shakespearean actor at Flinders University while teaching drama and freelance directing.
“All I can say is, they were all good actors. I can’t actually say ‘did I know what was going to happen?’ because I can’t.
“All you can do is give them a good training. You can’t actually predict what will happen.”
Success in acting is never a sure thing. So many careers are built around the luck of being chosen for something that exposes you at just the right time.
For every Cate Blanchett, whose career took off and never faltered, there is an Essie Davis who went through with Blanchett and only came to national notice 20 years later as Phryne Fisher in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.
And then there is Sam Worthington, the NIDA graduate and star of the Avatar franchise whose success few saw coming.
“Luck is involved,” says Knight. “I think any great actor, including a Judi Dench or an Ian McKellen, would put down luck as a factor.
“What we have given them is a foundation, so that if the break comes, they will be able to fly.”
At NIDA, Snook had her first professional stage exposure in a collaboration with Sydney Theatre Company which put her on stage alongside theatre great Pamela Rabe, if only as an extra, in a play directed by Nigel Jamieson.
Her year also put on productions of Macbeth and in her second year at NIDA she had a key role in a play about the supernatural called The Love Talker.
Knight likes to think of Snook more as one of the very good students from an exceptional year who blossomed once she left in ways he never could have foreseen.
“Take this for example; Jennifer Kent. Now Jenny Kent was a terrific actress, wonderful, but Jenny has really found herself directing The Babadook (2014) and The Nightingale (2018),” Knight says. “I would not have known that was in her, in the Jenny Kent I knew at NIDA, and I am delighted for her.”
In her very first job as a NIDA graduate, Snook came home.
While in her final year, Adam Cook was artistic director of State Theatre Company of South Australia and Knight invited him to NIDA to guest direct a Restoration comedy, Love for Love, with the cast from Snook’s year.
Knight deliberately put Snook in front of him, hoping he might hire her.
“Tony said ‘I’ll give you the two students who are from Adelaide in case you really gel with them and like their work and want to hire them when they graduate’,” says Cook, who is head of acting at the Actors Centre Australia in Sydney.
“So, he gave me Aimee Horne (who has worked mainly in theatre) and Sarah, and she was fantastic in it.”
Cook saw in Snook an enthusiastic student with stage presence who was resourceful and inventive, and he asked her to audition for a State Theatre production of King Lear he was planning for the following year, starring John Gaden in the role of the deluded Lear.
He cast Snook as Cordelia, the only one of the king’s three daughters who loves her father, and also as The Fool, who appears onstage as the King’s spoken conscience.
“Sarah was great,” he says. “I mean Cordelia is pretty straight up; she is honest and guileless and when she sees her sisters being so hypocritical and praising (Lear) and telling him how much they love him, she says ‘Love, and be silent’. It is much more direct.”
But as The Fool, Snook was a captivating presence who breathed spirit into the production, and who interacted with Gaden in inventive ways, wearing a hat and a white tuxedo.
“What we kind of looked for was a blend of Dietrich and Chaplin,” Cook says. “She went with it, and it was a highlight of the show.”
Like Knight, Cook says he could never have predicted how meteoric her rise would be but he recognised the talent that was there.
“I knew that I had made a confident decision and I was happy in casting her,” he says.
“I was confident that she would deliver and she did. And I loved the homecoming idea of it as well, that she was coming back to the state and her friends and family would see how she had matured and blossomed as an actor.”
WELCOME BACK HOME
The reality was that when Snook, in 2009, turned up in Adelaide for King Lear, her first job, she had spent almost a year working as a Sydney barista just to pay the rent.
In 2015, she told SA Weekend that she spent that year comforted by the knowledge she had work at the end of it.
“That helped the mindset coming out, because it’s such a stressful time when you graduate,” she says.
“Now, you’re out (of NIDA), you’re employable immediately but sometimes you’re not employed immediately.”
Yet within two years, she was one of three virtually unknown actors who made it to the final auditions for the Hollywood adaptation of the violent Stieg Larsson thriller, Girl with a Dragon Tattoo.
She sent a self-tape audition of an aggressive, man-hating feminist poem and ended saying into the camera, “screw you for making me do this. I hate self-tapes.”
After a live audition, she had more call backs but the part ultimately went to the American actor Rooney Mara.
Snook was relieved because she knew it was happening too soon. She felt she wasn’t ready and did not want to risk jeopardising her career by taking on a part she could not manage.
“I had no idea what was going on,” she said in 2015.
“Most of the time I was just flying by the seat of my pants, trying to prepare and do the best job but with no wealth of experience to draw on.”
Over the next few years, she followed her instincts with career choices that built a body of work in Australia and the US and included the television series The Secret River, a small role in the Hollywood biopic Steve Jobs, a supporting role in The Dressmaker, a part alongside Helen Mirren and former Adelaide actor Jason Clarke in Winchester, and a small role in Holding the Man, which starred her NIDA friend, Ryan Corr.
There were odd choices; like Predestination, a time-travelling, gender fluid sci-fi film with Ethan Hawke and Australian Noah Taylor.
Without knowing it, she was getting into position to put her stamp on the role of a lifetime as Shiv Roy, one of four damaged children vying for their father’s affection, three of them for his job.
Her talent was being noticed and she left a trail of admirers among some big-name actors who worked with her.
Ethan Hawke had never heard of Snook when she was cast in Predestination in the tricky transgender role of The Unmarried Mother.
At a press conference promoting the film in the US, he couldn’t stop raving.
“Sarah Snook’s performance is one of the most incredible I’ve been part of,” he said.
“I really want people to see the film to experience what an incredible performance this is. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.”
She auditioned for Succession half-heartedly after reading in the notes a comparison of her character with Ivanka Trump.
“Well, that’s not me,” she told Variety magazine.
She went through the audition process thinking she was being used as a bargaining chip to get someone better, and then she got the part.
It started quietly but the momentum quickly grew.
Snook became an integral part of an ensemble with her on-screen brothers played by Ruck, Kieran Culkin (Roman) and Jeremy Strong (Kendall), with Brian Cox as her father Logan Roy, and British actor Matthew Macfadyen as her on-screen husband Tom.
She has said she spent the first season expecting to get fired. Then she relaxed. Three Emmy nominations later, the prize is likely to be hers.
THE NEXT STAGE
Cook says Snook’s decision to move to New York was a bold one, given there are so many more actors in the US vying for parts.
He likens her to another Adelaide actor with a stellar career, Genevieve O’Reilly, who graduated from NIDA in 2000 and went straight to the UK where her first job was being cast in Richard II, against Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic.
O’Reilly, Irish-born and Adelaide-raised, stars in the TV series Tin Star and played the character Mon Mothma in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Now, when Cook watches Snook in Succession, or O’Reilly in her latest TV series The Secret, he tries to switch off and not focus on the mechanics of their acting.
“It can be hard when you know them well to just switch off and surrender to the performance,” Cook says. “But I did that, watching Sarah in Succession.”
Coming off Succession, and having just had her first child, a girl, with husband Dave Lawson, it would seem Snook has nothing left to prove.
But Knight says performing Dorian Gray in front of UK critics is a very big call.
“I reckon – I hope – she is going to be absolutely fantastic in Dorian Gray, but the British are not kind to Australian actors who play in the West End,” he says.
He says things may have changed but there was a love-hate relationship between UK critics and Australian actors; when Cate Blanchett went to the West End she was referred to in the press as “a colonial actress”.
Snook has played in London before, in 2016, against Ralph Fiennes in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and some reviews were critical, including The Guardian who singled out Snook’s performance as “clodhopping” and “plain irritating”.
But Knight says Snook’s classical training, dating back to her school days when she did her first Ibsen, has prepared her well to take on a major stage role.
“The training that Sarah went through at NIDA meant a lot of voice, a lot of Shakespeare, a lot of Chekhov – all the students were challenged by the great works of theatre and of literature, and we did that all the time,” Knight says.
“Hopefully, we give them a sense of resilience as well, which I think is very important, and a sense of independence. And I think you can see that in Sarah.”
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