Sarah Snook’s succession to stardom
‘Oh no! Oh no! Did I say that?’ Sarah Snook may be well and truly on Hollywood’s A-list, but that didn’t stop her treating the world to a truly bonza, ocker moment.
You can take the girl out of Adelaide, wrench her from near-obscurity and plonk her down, head whirling, in the starry firmament of Hollywood’s top tier. You can dress her in floor-sweeping, black-sequinned, décolletage-baring finery and watch her sparkle and smile on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, where her hit show, Succession, is to be crowned Best TV Drama. You can watch her field hokey questions like a pro, eloquent and poised, before totally losing her cool upon recalling an encounter with Little Women director Greta Gerwig, whose praise and mere presence at a recent event robbed the young actress of speech and reason. And then you can smother a grin as Sarah Snook introduces millions of Americans to the phrase “stunned mullet”. Because you cannot take Adelaide out of the girl.
“Oh no! Oh no! Did I say that?” Snook, 32, is curled up on a couch in her Brooklyn home three weeks later, laughing but mortified as she is reminded of that bonza ocker moment. Celebrities don’t blush. Hell, people don’t blush any more. But this striking redhead is slowly, charmingly, turning the colour of her ballet-pink jumper as she tries but fails to disappear into its hood.
“I do that a lot, use Aussie slang, and I don’t realise people won’t know what I’m talking about,” she says, still cringing. She did it just recently on set, informing her co-stars that something-or-other would “stick out like a shag on a rock”. “They were all like, ‘What? Who’s having sex on a rock?’ ” She tried “stick out like dogs’ balls”. No, that was worse. “I just ended up saying, ‘It’s a bit obvious’,” she says. “Just… obvious.”
Such are the pitfalls of being the sole Australian on a mega-hit American TV series, a juggernaut of a show that HBO considers the natural successor to its previous smash, Game of Thrones. Succession is a knives-out, savagely funny melodrama in which members of the elaborately awful Roy family stab each other in the back, front and both sides in their attempts to wrest power from the ageing media-mogul patriarch. It’s King Lear meets the politico-media complex and it has become appointment viewing for fans of barbed-wire dialogue, superb acting and overheated wealth porn.
Snooky, as her friends call her, would watch the show even if she wasn’t on it. Speaking of which, why is she even on it? She still can’t wrap her head around it. Can’t quite believe it. Little old her: a ukulele-playing, KeepCup-toting, nature-loving Patti Smith fan from Adelaide. The daughter of a swimming-pool salesman and an aged care provider who wasn’t even sure she had the chops to make acting a career until she booked a Shakespeare play at the State Theatre Company of South Australia a year after graduating from NIDA. Even then she thought she’d better firm up her primary-school-teacher Plan B.
In what universe does someone like her find herself twirling down a series of awards-season red carpets, basking in compliments from her idols: Amy Adams, Kristen Bell, Amy Poehler and Greta freaking Gerwig?
It’s called Imposter Syndrome and Snook cheerfully admits to suffering from the scourge of high-achievers everywhere. “We all have it, particularly women,” she says. “You know, ‘I don’t deserve to be here, I’ll find a reason that validates my thoughts about this’.” Outrageously talented, with an unorthodox Pre-Raphaelite look that leaves more conventional beauties in the shade, Snook prefers to view her success as a series of kindnesses bequeathed to her by fate. She was convinced the role in Succession was “out of my league” and would have backed out of the audition if not for an insistent friend, Australian actress Jessica Tovey.
“She made me do it,” Snook laughs. “I truly didn’t think I had a chance. I thought they’d hire someone else who was far better qualified for the job and knew what they were doing. I just sort of threw off the audition: I don’t know what to do, so here you go, fine, take that. I really was thinking, ‘This is sweet, I get to have a five-day holiday in LA, see my friends, turn around, go back. Thanks guys. Bye!’”
Even five episodes in, she was sure she would be fired. “By episode six I thought, I still don’t know what I’m doing but at least it’s harder to fire me now; it would be expensive ’cause they’ve shot so much,” she says. “I also justified it in my head that, because I was one of only two females [on the series], firing one would look bad.”
Snook has occupied the “one to watch” list for years, but Succession has made her a star. In the space of 18 months, the Emmy-winning show has been elevated to the pantheon of American pop cultural touchstones, with Snook’s character, the sardonic media heiress Shiv (short for Siobhan), emerging as a fan favourite. Steven Spielberg, Hillary Clinton and Paul McCartney are known to be devotees of the show, as is Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Jerry Hall. (Showrunner Jesse Armstrong has said he modelled the show’s paterfamilias on Murdoch with dashes of Sumner Redstone and other past and present media moguls. Shiv is said to be a mix of Elisabeth Murdoch, Shari Redstone and Ivanka Trump.) Shiv’s wardrobe is endlessly scrutinised and minutely dissected by magazines from Glamour to The New Yorker. When she cut her hair for season two, it was breaking news. People even dressed as Shiv (red wig, high-waisted pants, turtleneck) for Halloween.
Yet it soon becomes clear there’s a yawning disconnect between the woman sitting on the couch in her trackies, cheeks burning, and the big shot she has become. “It’s kinda great that she’s like that,” says LA-based Australian director Peter Spierig who, with twin brother Michael, was among the first to spot Snook’s outsized talent. “I had dinner with her a couple of weeks ago in LA and she’s exactly the same as she was when we first met her,” Spierig says. “Very sweet, very smart, funny, easygoing. People can change pretty quickly when everyone’s telling you how fantastic you are but it hasn’t gone to her head in any way.”
In 2012, the Spierig brothers cast her in a tricky role that required she play both male and female versions of the same character for the sci-fi noir Predestination, opposite Ethan Hawke. If more people had seen Predestination, an utterly original, gender-bending time travel movie based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story, Snook would surely have blipped on the radar sooner. Hawke, her “lovely mentor”, declared at the time: “I have never been part of a performance that has been better than this.” As it was, the criminally underrated film made barely a ripple at the international box office, despite netting bouquets from critics and a Best Actress AACTA award for Snook. No CGI-juiced superhero brawls, you see. “I remember people saying her character was part Jodie Foster and part Leonardo DiCaprio,” Spierig says. “It was a scary concept because we had an actress playing both parts and if it didn’t work the whole movie was going to completely fall over. But Sarah was so good, she really worked hard at it.” Working with a dialogue-heavy script, “she never missed a beat, she’s just a total pro.”
Snook’s New York roommate, the Australian actor Daniel Henshall (Snowtown, The Babadook), sees a certain inevitability in her trajectory. “Not to say she comes into her own – she’s been coming into her own for a long time – but that Succession role shows all of what she’s able to embody in her work,” he says. “It shows her vulnerability, her strength, her nous; it shows her humour. It’s a bang-on role and she gives it so much life.”
Snook is a great believer in kismet, in shamans and auras and the interconnectedness of creation. Whatever will be, will be. It’s key to her unaffected manner, her equable, so-it-goes cool. In Sarah Snook’s world, even setbacks are just markers on a preordained path. In 2010, she came within a whisker of being cast as the lead in the English-language version of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a role that had young Hollywood buzzing. She lost out to Rooney Mara but caught the eye of heavyweight producer Scott Rudin, who backed her for Steve Jobs, a biopic with Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet. Rudin was so impressed he recommended Snook for the lead opposite Ralph Fiennes in Ibsen’s The Master Builder at the iconic Old Vic theatre in London, where its spellbound artistic director, Matthew Warchus, declared her in the same league as Judi Dench and Judy Davis. (She made a triumphant return to the stage as Joan of Arc in the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2018 production.)
And then the wheel of fortune spun full circle. In 2016, Francine Maisler, casting director for both Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Steve Jobs, was charged with building an electrifying ensemble for the pilot of a new HBO show. She still had Snook on speed dial.
It may have skipped a generation, but acting isin Snook’s blood. Her maternal grandmother trod the boards in London during the 1930s and brought Shakespeare in the Park to New Zealand when she immigrated. She also brought an adventurous spirit, which jumped the Tasman and was handed down to a redheaded granddaughter growing up in Adelaide long after her passing.
Snook’s parents divorced when she was young and, for a while, her mother ran a boarding house next to the girls-only high school her two older sisters attended. Snook refused to go. “I’ve always got along pretty well with guys – most of my friendships through school were with dudes – and I didn’t like the idea of going to a single-sex school,” she says. Instead, she won a drama scholarship to Scotch College. Despite collecting the half-serious Meryl Streep Drama Award upon leaving primary, “I never thought of acting as a career at high school,” she says. “It was only about a year into NIDA that I thought, ‘Cool, maybe I can do this as a job’.”
After graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2008, Snook popped up in minor roles on TV shows All Saints, Packed to the Rafters and Redfern Now and, in 2012, won the Best Actress AACTA award for the ABC drama Sisters of War, for which she also received an Outstanding Newcomer Logie nomination.
Her recent success has prompted an influx of scripts, but HBO has first dibs on her time. She just wrapped an American-Canadian film with Ellen Burstyn and Shia LaBeouf called Pieces of a Woman, and has plans for a brief camping holiday in Australia before season three of Succession starts filming in April ahead of a late 2020 air date on Foxtel. Beyond that, she is expanding her skill set. A keen photographer, Snook has lately been “interning” with directors, with an eye to stepping behind the camera herself. She was attachment director for Riot and Lambs of God helmer Jeffrey Walker and recently shadowed Succession director Mark Mylod for two weeks’ filming in Croatia. “It’s a newish thing,” she says. “I want to get a little more confidence and get something going with that.” She’s written a short film she hopes to direct this year and is in the process of writing a feature, a romantic comedy that “feels very Australian as I’m writing it; the voices are Australian”.
Once upon a time, in a land far from Hollywood, Snook played a fairy. Scrap that, she was a fairy. She inhabited that fairy lifestyle so thoroughly; she really went method. Diaphanous purple gown. Star-tipped wand. The children swarming the weekend birthday parties truly believed Fairy Lavender could fly. It was her first paying gig and she loved it. “Oh my God, I loved it so much!” Snook is covering her mouth with both hands, but she can’t hold back a hoot of pure delight. Her eyes are dancing. “I was Fairy Lavender in Adelaide and when I moved to Sydney I had to become Fairy Twinkletoes because they already had a Fairy Lavender. I stole my friend’s fairy name from Adelaide.” The fairy gig helped pay her way through NIDA, but it also reinforced her passion for technique and helped bolster her faith in the ineffable truth of make-believe.
“Kids have such brilliant minds and imaginations and they have such honest belief,” she says. “It’s certainly the best training ground for acting because they also will not take any bullshit; they won’t believe in it if you don’t believe in it. And that’s the most important thing with acting – you have to believe in what you’re doing and saying as a version of the truth. You can’t be half-arsed about it, because kids can tell that immediately.”
Snook’s two sisters are far away – in London and Papua New Guinea – and she misses her young nieces and nephews. If she could wave a magic wand and have all her friends and family close, she wouldn’t hesitate. But a peripatetic lifestyle puts paid to that kind of stability. She is single at the moment, having recently exited an eight-year relationship. “It’s very difficult living out of a suitcase,” she says. “You don’t have an anchor when you’re doing that; it’s hard to start a relationship or maintain a relationship when you’re on the move all the time.”
Tiring of the nomadic life, Snook moved in with Henshall and his costume designer wife Stacey when Succession began filming the second season at the end of 2018. While she often packed her bags for location shoots in Iceland, Scotland and Croatia, “at least I have a wardrobe I can unpack my suitcase into when I get back,” she says. “It helps me feel a bit grounded.” She lives in a cosy house in Brooklyn, and there are enough Aussies around to form “a family by proxy”. Snook is a big hit at her friends’ children’s parties. “I corral all the kids, play games, stories, magic; like, I’ve done this before,” she laughs.
Shiv Roy, of course, would sneer at such proletarian pastimes. Shiv would look down her nose and give that signature Shiv look: arms crossed, chin tilted, a withering, sceptical side-eye. Shiv once told her hapless husband Tom (played by English actor Matthew Macfadyen) she wanted an open relationship – on their wedding night. She intimidated a sexual assault victim out of testifying against the family firm. Shiv is ruthless ambition incarnate and Snook plays her with a mix of old-Hollywood hauteur and 21st-century sass while somehow, magically, prompting a degree of empathy. There’s very little of Shiv in Snook.
“We run lines together so it’s really interesting to see how it realises itself on screen after practising stuff with her at home,” says Henshall, who has acted alongside Snook in the Australian films Not Suitable for Children and These Final Hours, as well as 2015’s The Beautiful Lie, a modern adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina. “That character is very removed from who she is, but it’s something she’s able to connect with. Shiv has given her the confidence to fill her space.”
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The celebrated opening line of Anna Karenina could have been written with Succession’s wildly dysfunctional Roy family in mind. It is, ultimately, their collective unhappiness that creates a seam of pathos, elevating the show beyond mere eat-the-rich satire. In the baroque battle to supplant patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) as head of global media conglomerate Waystar Roy, three of his children – self-sabotaging drug addict Kendall (Jeremy Strong), louche jester Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Snook’s Shiv – are pitted against one another as the company careens from one crisis to the next. Yet it’s clear that all the power plays and money moves are just part of a Sisyphean struggle for daddy’s attention. “In the end, it’s a story about family,” says Snook. “Family is meant to be the strongest bond and yet when these people’s lives are in crisis it’s the thing that tears them apart. I feel like there’s recognition there for a lot of people. No matter how much money you have it’s never enough to fill the void left by the loss of love or purpose or those fundamental things we all need and want as humans.”
Not having any billionaire friends (“that I’m aware of!”), Snook found entree into a world of wealth beyond imagining a challenge. “It’s all very alien to me and I didn’t know really how to access it. So I researched a lot.” The work of Lauren Greenfield, who has been chronicling the lives of America’s plutocracy for 30 years in photo and film, was invaluable. “She looks at America’s relationship to money, what that is in terms of status and how it can destroy or build a person,” she says.
Shiv wouldn’t recognise Imposter Syndrome if it imposed itself down her throat. “She believes she has the right to be anywhere because she’s wealthy enough to not have to be there if she doesn’t want to be,” Snook says. “There is no glass ceiling for her because there is no ceiling. She doesn’t have any doubt. She’s kind of thoughtless and I… like that about her.” She laughs. “Because it’s not me at all so I get to pretend for a while.”
Snook finds little to aspire to in the lifestyle of the one per cent. The Roys catch helicopters like Ubers, use human beings as footstools. In season two, house staff unceremoniously scrape a lavish seafood lunch into the bin and the family orders in pizza, which no one eats. “It’s awful but… why would you not if you’re that wealthy? That’s what I mean with the constant checking of privilege – even people who drink loads of bottled water when there’s perfectly good tap water. We have the privilege of being able to drink from the tap in most western countries so stop buying bottled water! Drink from the f..king tap.”
Snook cocks an eyebrow and tips her refillable water bottle forward in a (frankly, Shiv-like) sign-off salute. Then the girl from Adelaide with the world at her feet tucks her hair into a messy topknot and heads off to heat up some soup for dinner.