Long before Sarah Snook played the cut-throat Shiv Roy on Succession, she was fascinated with villains and off-beat characters. Growing up in Australia, she watched plenty of Disney movies — but she never aspired to be the princess.
"I was the one who came out of that going like, 'Great, I want to be the genie, I wanna be Jafar. I want to be Iago. I want to be Ursula. ... I want all the characters who go and do stuff and who are funny and strange and weird and get great musical numbers,'" Snook says.
Snook gets to indulge that fantasy a bit as the star of the Broadway show The Picture of Dorian Gray. Adapted from Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel, the play tells the story of a young man who makes a Faustian bargain that allows him to stay young and beautiful while his portrait ages and decays. It features 26 different characters — all played by Snook.
"Each character sits somewhere differently in my body," she says. "Each of the characters had an accent, as well as what physicality came from that. It's very much a physical sensation."
The show uses huge video screens, cameras, iPhones, lightning-quick costume changes and recordings to tell a story that culminates in Dorian ultimately facing his sins and his mortality. Snook won an Olivier Award for the role when the play ran in London in 2024. Now she's been nominated for a Tony Award.
Playing so many characters presents unique challenges. Snook says there have been two instances on stage when she did the slightly wrong voice for a character. But, she adds, the director "Kip [Williams] happened to be in the audience on one of those shows and he didn't notice, so that was good. [It happened] in a kind of chaotic moment which I was aware of (but no one else was) so that was a good cover, at least."
Interview highlights
On standing on stage alongside videotaped version of herself
It's really strange because … there's only once that I can see myself … but otherwise I just have to listen to the audio recording aspect of it because I'm either back of the stage, or I'm in front of the screen, or I am behind the screen. I can't interact with it in that way. It really forces you to listen to what the person is saying, to what I'm saying, and forces you to be really imaginative, really engage with your imagination and [examine] how that makes you feel and what words are springing out to you tonight and what parts of the tone or how it's been delivered is bringing out. And maybe that comes from listening to audiobooks when I was a kid a lot and having that imagination sustained in that way.
On the precise timing required to act alongside recordings of herself
They're the worst kind of actors that I'm working with. They don't wait for me at all. They'll just barrel on and if I don't keep up, it's my fault. … I can only see a kind of a side version of them as well because the screen is obviously not three-dimensional. But weirdly enough, because it's six different people, and each of those was shot individually and then comped together, and there's the kind of magic of that. They're all doing different things at different times.
On why she almost didn't audition for Shiv in Succession
Personally, I don't have any experience by association or proximity with wealth at that level. I guess I didn't understand the show so much. I didn't, at that time, want to be a secondary kind of handbag character to the men in the show. … [I thought] straight white men in business and there's no room for me there so I don't think I'll have a very interesting throughline and maybe I don't think I'm gonna get this role anyway — so I don't want to audition. I was auditioning for something else and already had hair and makeup on, which is such an effort when you're doing self-tapes … and my friend said, "Just read the lines, let's just have fun, let's just try and do it." And I am forever grateful for her.
On how being aware of the constantly moving cameras on Succession helps her for Dorian
[They're] very different in terms of the specificity required for Dorian and the fluidity allowed in Succession, but something about the proximity of cameras and the kind of subtextual or subconscious awareness of them as a character in both [performances] has been really useful. … One of the camera operators [on Succession], at one point, he was on the other side of the couch. I was doing the scene, he's behind my back on the other side on the couch … and within three seconds I turn and throw another line back over my shoulder and he's right behind me. He has crossed the couch somehow. He's, like, leapt over it with a camera in hand. And that kind of agility from the camera operators, both in Dorian and Succession, is very similar.
On Shiv's character as an observer of her family's chaos
I mean sometimes it just came out of me as Sarah feeling like I couldn't compete in the level of comedy, humor, or improv that Kieran [Culkin]'s ... able to deliver. So half the time it was like, I'll just keep my mouth shut and have an opinion that I'll keep to myself. The camera will pick it up. And that sort of somewhat developed into a character choice as much as it was an acting choice.
I think it's right for her, though, as the younger sister of, oftentimes, a room full of men, you're just kind of like, alright, let me watch my stupid older brother and my even stupider older brother … fight themselves out and tear themselves down and get themselves into a knot — and then, "Here I am, Dad. I've just been sitting here." There's a cunning quality to Shiv and a part of that is just being the observer.
On filming the emotional scenes when the Roy kids learn their father is dead
I knew that I would … lose the freshness if I stayed, "in character all day" if I was, like, down in the dumps and dealing with the passing of my father all day, it's just going to run out. Like, I'm going to get dehydrated in a sort of practical sense because I'm gonna be crying and I'm not going to be refueling enough with water. I'm gonna get desensitized to the fact of my father dying. So I was doing stupid stuff to actively put myself into a different space. …
If you work hard enough, you can be elastic. If you lean on your imagination enough, you can come in and you can come out. You just have to be mindful of how you do it because you don't want to shortchange your performance, but to trust that there is that ability to do that.
Lauren Krenzel and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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