‘What is a happy ending?’: Sarah Snook on Succession’s impending finale

Catch up with all of our recaps and coverage of the final season of Succession, in our collection.See all 23 stories.

In the final episode of the third season of Succession, the Roy family sit down to play a game of Monopoly. It is a finely crafted moment, reducing the complex machinations within one of the world’s wealthiest (fictional) families to a game of paper and plastic that retails for less than $30.

As the board game most likely to end in a dinner table rumpus, however, it is also a sign of things to come. The show’s creator Jesse Armstrong has confirmed the fourth season of Succession, which airs from Monday, March 27, will be the last. At stake in the war of the Roys: who wins and loses the battle to inherit, and ultimately control, the media giant Waystar RoyCo.

“What is a happy ending?” asks Adelaide-born actress Sarah Snook, who plays Siobhan - “Shiv” - Roy, one of the contenders in the battle to inherit her father’s corporate throne. “Someone’s always going to be unhappy with any ending. And I think with this ending, there’s just as many questions thrown up about where these characters go from here.”

The show’s premise is deliciously Shakespearean: the power-hungry patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) rules over Waystar RoyCo and must deal with the ambitions and succession hopes of his four children, the eldest, Connor (Alan Ruck), with whom he is estranged, the almost-Machiavellian Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the smart-mouthed Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Logan’s only daughter, the ambitious Shiv.

Australian actress Sarah Snook will say goodbye to her character Shiv Roy after the fourth and final season of Succession. Credit: Alexi Lubomirski/August

At this point, it’s anyone’s game. (Except probably Connor, who is something of an also-ran; the smart money is backing Kendall or Shiv.) And there are just 10 one-hour episodes left of a television series which has turned a blue-chip cable soap about a wealthy family into one of the best white-knuckle armchair dramas since Breaking Bad, The Sopranos or The Wire.

“One sort of marker of success that I find within the show is that the working environment on the inside has been really challenging and rewarding,” Snook says. “There is a great chemistry between cast, crew, and creatives, where we really respect each other’s work and because of that want to do good and better work for each other.

“At the head of that has always been [creator/producer] Jesse Armstrong, and the other writers, delivering high-quality scripts. And the production crew, the production design team, [led by] Steve Carter, just blow it out of the water,” Snook says.

“So much of that doesn’t get seen; that’s just the nature of television. But it translates into how cohesive the show is on-screen, and it has an opportunity to say something to the culture and to speak to what is happening in the world right now.

Heiress presumptive Shiv Roy (played by Sarah Snook).Credit: HBO/Foxtel

“I wonder how many people watch it and go, this is an indictment on too much wealth, too much media control, too much power, or whether they see it as a family drama, and those are just the circumstances.”

There is no doubt that production design is central to the success of the series. The striking of a very specific balance between being fashionable without slipping into vulgar ostentation. The difference, perhaps, between the 1981 oil soap Dynasty, which nailed the architecture and subtle aesthetic materialism of a billionaire family, and its 2017 remake, which looked a little too “ground floor retail” to be taken seriously. Succession is very much the former.

The most exciting part about this show for me was just trusting the writing and seeing where it took us.

Sarah Snook

In part, Snook says, that is the city of New York itself. “It’s not a set, we’re not looking at a green screen. That is real New York behind us. That feels large,” she says. But it also talks to the way the wealthy, like anyone, interact with their native spaces. “The characters have grown up in this world and feel a level of entitlement to it, but [possess] a desensitising to it as well. You have to be both impressed by it, and ignore it.”

Succession has also proved to be the making of its (relatively) younger cast. It shone a sudden spotlight on Strong. It turned Culkin from a former child actor to a performer of formidable substance. And it put Snook on the map. She was NIDA-trained, but mostly known for television projects such as Sisters of War, and warmly received but not culture-shaking literary adaptations like The Secret River and The Beautiful Lie. Now she has Daina Reid’s Run Rabbit Run coming to Netflix, and Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash’s The Beanie Bubble coming to Apple TV+.

As vultures hoping to peck at the remains of a paternal de-throning, the ensemble in Succession is incandescent. Each plays their part with a different set of tools, but it is Strong’s method that seems to have drawn the lion’s share of media attention. In a December 2021 profile of Strong in The New Yorker written by Michael Schulman, the actor was painted as an intense presence on the set. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” Strong told Schulman.

Sarah Snook says there were mixed reactions when cast read the script for the final episode of Succession.Credit: Vincent Tullo/The New York Times

The reaction was ... complicated. “It’s hard for me to actually describe his process because I don’t really see it. That might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn’t help me,” Culkin said. Scottish-born Brian Cox described it as a “particularly American” way of working. “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous, I just worry about what he does to himself.”

Like any ensemble, Snook says, when I tackle the topic with her, “collaborative energy has to be present, and its success is determined by the level of collaboration and respect given to everybody’s process of working. It’s not accurate to say that because [Jeremy is] down the mental rabbit hole, he is then more committed than any other actor. I feel like it’s his way of doing it. And I think it gets misunderstood.

Sarah Snookat HBO’s Golden Globes after-party in Los Angeles in 2020.Credit: Nina Westervelt/The New York Times

“Actors can develop habits of working that feel comfortable and familiar to them, and then risk getting stuck in those habits in order to create a performance that they feel confident to stand in and behind,” Snook says. “Jeremy could be as fine an actor with or without his process, but he chooses to use that process, and that’s up to him. That’s how he feels confident in his performance.

“For me, it is listening, making sure that you know where you’re coming from, where you’re going to, who your character is, what their opinion is of each other person in the scene and then just shutting up, doing the lines and listening. And seeing where it will take you,” Snook says. “The most exciting part about this show for me was just trusting the writing and seeing where it took us.”

The descriptor assigned to Succession by HBO is that of a “satirical black comedy/drama”. It’s a simple kind of detail for a TV show, and one which would not usually bear deeper examination. In most instances on television, a declaration of the genre is taken at its word.

Sarah Snook reacts as Succession wins the Emmy for outstanding drama series.Credit: AP

With Succession, however, it conveys the sometimes impenetrable line the series walks. The scale of the storytelling is huge, a dark mirror to real-world media empires and the intrigues which seem to manifest around them. The narrative therefore easily slips into high-stakes tension. But as a viewer, when the white-knuckle moments are punctured by the lightness of touch, it’s sometimes hard to know what you’re watching.

“In certain ways, the architecture of the show, that we talked about, really helps to sort of anchor it in drama,” Snook says. “The music of the show also makes it feel more grand. And I think in a lot of ways it is primarily a drama, and the characters use humour to deflect or defend or to aggravate or to provoke their enemies or even their loved ones.

Sarah Snook in Run Rabbit Run.

“So this family just happen to be quite good at quips, one-liners and punchlines,” she says. “But at the root, they’re still a family. And that’s the drive of the show. How those elements blend, she adds, comes from Armstrong himself. “Jesse can’t help but be funny, nor can he help in real life seeing or thinking of the comedy in a situation.”

Maybe. But whether they are mimicking the Murdochs, the Redstones (who control the TV network CBS), the Sulzbergers (who have dominated the history of The New York Times), the Hearsts or even the Trumps, this fictional family’s real-life counterparts are not just battling for control of financial empires, they are engaged in democracy-shaking moves and counter-moves.

The original series concept for Succession followed Armstrong’s work on an unproduced screenplay about the Murdoch family, which means their presence in the DNA in the storytelling is hard to deny. As the series progressed through a penultimate season, it also zeroed in on Murdoch-specific parallels: a daughter sidelined from the business, and a patriarch who has remained at helm past an expected age of retirement.

Sarah Snook as Australian army nurse Lorna Whyte in Sisters of War.

“For something to have such a cultural impact, there has to be a way to grow it into real life comparisons, and I think limiting it to one family does a disservice to the cultural impact that it could have,” Snook says.

“There are plenty of media/dynastic power families, even families across other industries, that behave in ways that are similar to the Roys.

“If people are able to draw comparisons and then have opinions on that, and the opinions maybe aren’t so favourable, if there’s good to be created from that, then that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But for an actor playing the role, it’s too limiting for me to be like, I’m going to look at Elisabeth Murdoch and just emulate her.

“I may have done some research on her, who she is, what she has done in terms of business, for the first season and then thought, well, that’s not Shiv,” Snook adds. “There’s a finite amount of information you can get from that. The imagination is much more bountiful.

“But of course people can’t help but draw comparisons, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I know that Jesse will have been inspired by moments from Murdoch family history, but I know absolutely that he was inspired by many moments of the Redstones, and there are plenty of other families that aren’t necessarily well known in the media.”

All of this now turns into the final straight of a four-season race that has delivered one of the most outstanding television series in recent memory, one of a handful of masterworks that transcended the medium and connected with the wider culture. On-screen, as the fourth season gets underway, the internal conflict within the Roy family has reached an existential level.

“In a way this show does inspire questions and considerations beyond the episodes, so it is like, f---, where do these characters go? What are they going to do? How do they deal with each other in the future from here? Which has also been the central question to the show across the four seasons,” Snook says.

“Does [the final season] answer the central question? Both yes and no. When the [script for the] last episode came out, and we all read it, there were members of the cast who read it and went, oh well, we’re getting a fifth season. And others who read it and went, oh, well, this is obviously the end. You can’t go beyond this. Which is perfect.”

The fourth season of Succession premieres Monday, March 27, on Fox Showcase at 1pm and 8:30pm and will stream on Binge.

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