‘Mountain to climb’: Sarah Snook on motherhood and shades of Gray
The award-winning Succession star reveals how she juggled the West End and Broadway one-woman productions of The Picture of Dorian Gray with becoming a mother.
For Sarah Snook, whatever came after her award-winning four-season run as Shiv Roy on Succession would have to be the challenge of a lifetime.
She found it in her two latest pursuits: starring first on the West End and now on Broadway in an audacious one-woman staging of The Picture of Dorian Gray – and becoming a mother.
“It’s a mountain to climb. And I think the challenge of that was really attractive,” Snook told Vogue Australia of the production.
She appears on the cover of the magazine’s April issue, shot in the lush landscape of Mount Macedon, an hour north of Melbourne.
Dorian Gray and parenthood will forever be entwined for the 37-year-old actor. In 2023, as the series finale of Succession aired around the world, Snook had just welcomed a baby daughter with her husband, actor Dave Lawson.
Six months later, she returned to work, stepping into the rehearsal room to take on all 26 roles in the West End staging of the Sydney Theatre Company’s blockbuster adaptation of Dorian Gray, the biggest production in the institution’s history with more than 145,000 tickets sold.
“I think I’ll look back in 10 years’ time and go, what were you thinking? My husband Dave has said if he’d seen the show, he would’ve tried to convince me out of it. ’Cause he has a 13-year-old, so he knows what it’s like to have a kid. Ignorance is bliss, in that sense,” Snook said, in her interview with Dorian Gray director Kip Williams, the former Sydney Theatre Company artistic director.
“You presume, I can do anything. And also the feminist in you goes, why should work stop you from being a mother, or mothering stop you from doing work?
“And then on the other side of that you go, well, sometimes it’s nice to just focus on one thing, and not split your time between the two and feel guilty on both sides for not doing enough at work, or enough at home.”
Speaking to Williams in Vogue’s April issue, Snook reflected on the joy of being able to bring her infant daughter into the Dorian Gray rehearsal room before the 2024 West End run.
“The strangely unexpected stress relief of having a kid present, particularly in tech week, when she came in and people would be high stress and go, oh! There’s a baby here. Nothing is as important as keeping a baby safe and alive and happy,” said Snook. “Long may she laugh in the theatre and bring joy to the theatre.”
For Snook, Dorian Gray has been “an immense challenge, but enjoyable”.
Her performance on the West End won her an Olivier Award, and the play opened on Broadway this month as one of the most anticipated shows of the 2025 season.
If the pressure of following up the success of Succession was daunting, bringing Dorian Gray to New York is an even greater task.
“Maybe more so because it is a known quantity,” Snook explained. “I’d rather walk into a room and have people be like, she can’t do it, and then I go, watch this. Rather than, I can’t wait to see what you do! And I go, please, turn your eyes away.”
Vogue Australia’s April issue is on sale Monday, April 7.
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