As a teenager in Australia she felt ugly and depressed. Now she has won her second Golden Globe and is bringing The Picture of Dorian Gray to the West End. How did ‘Shiv’ smash through the glass ceiling?
The Picture of Dorian Gray doesn’t end well for its protagonist, and Sarah Snook understands why.
“I had the experience once where all I wanted to do was be on the cover of a magazine,” she recalls with a rueful smile. “Like, wow, wouldn’t that be amazing? I could say, ‘See, I am beautiful in the eyes of the world.’ But then the f***ing thing came out and I had a real problem with it. Because I thought, ‘That isn’t me. I don’t look like that.’ " Her face had been digitally retouched beyond recognition.
“I’d always had the feeling of ‘Oh, I wish I was beautiful, I don’t look like the girls in the magazines’. But when you are the girl in the magazine, and you still don’t look like her — or feel like you do — it’s worse. And you’re, like, ‘I’ve got to really rethink where my values are.’ "
She evidently did rethink them, because I later realise I can’t even remember what she is wearing when we meet, except that it is rumpled and scruffy. The only detail I notice is her worn-out workwear boots with a big hole in one sole — because they’re the same old pair she has worn in every interview for years, and even on her wedding day. In Succession she wore sleek trouser suits and killer eyeliner. In real life, make-up free with tousled bed hair, she is a vision of aesthetic indifference — and it isn’t accidental. “I’ve been quite strongly defensive about not becoming interested in how I look because it would be far too dangerous for my own mental health.”
The Australian is about to appear in the West End in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s cautionary tale about Dorian Gray, a handsome young gentleman corrupted by the hedonistic values of a louche aristocrat, under whose influence he is inspired to sell his soul in exchange for eternal beauty. A painting of him will wither and age, while his own face retains its boyish perfection.
As Dorian devotes himself to sensual vice, his sins slowly contort his portrait, until at 38 — by then a blackmailer and murderer — he repents his vanity and takes a knife to the painting. Too late for redemption, it is himself he destroys. Servants discover his decrepit corpse lying beside the portrait, restored by his death to its original youthful charm.
Wilde once said his novel’s eponymous antihero “contains much of me”, but there is no discernible trace of Dorian in the star on the sofa opposite me in a Soho hotel. On a fleeting visit from Melbourne with her husband and new baby — bleary from jet lag and night feeds, but cheerfully relaxed — Snook seems completely unselfconscious, by turn casual and serious-minded, jokey and thoughtful. To describe an A-list celebrity as down to earth can be an implausible cliché, but she genuinely appears not to realise who she is.
To most of us, ever since Succession’s first series in 2018, she has been Shiv Roy, the daughter of a tyrannical media magnate, Logan Roy. The glossy, cold, manipulative billionairess was so unlike Snook herself, then a little-known actress, she very nearly turned the role down — but the four-series drama won her two Golden Globes (she picked up the award for best actress earlier this month) and made her a global household name. When the final episode aired last May she wept.
“Don’t think I was watching my acting and going, ‘My God, I’m so brilliant, cry, cry!’ " she quickly exclaims. “I was three or four weeks postpartum, the hormones were raging. But it was just the chrysalis of knowing that’s the end of this really important, special part of my life.”
Seeing Snook play Shiv was more like reading a novel than watching television. Like Meryl Streep she has a freakish gift for taking us inside her character’s mind while her face barely moves. But a role that big can be a bittersweet burden, so did part of her wonder if she’d ever play anything as epic again?
“Well, subconsciously” — and she bursts out laughing — “I think I’ve pretty much solved that with a 26-character role.”
In the adaptation of Dorian Gray Snook plays all 26 parts. The one-woman show from Sydney Theatre Company debuted in Sydney in 2020, where another Australian actress, Eryn Jean Norvill, won rave five-star reviews. The dizzying theatrical challenge both thrills and terrifies Snook — but that is not the play’s only appeal. The more she talks, the more its theme of beauty exercises her.
“I very purposefully have tried not to put my worth to myself into how I look because if you do, and one gets celebrated for that, when that goes — which it will — then what’s your worth? Which is why it’s so interesting to play Dorian Gray.”
When she became a mother last year, “I noticed it with my daughter. She’s a very cute baby and people already go, ‘Oh, what a beautiful girl!’ And there’s a sense of protection that kicks in for me, and goes, ‘Whoa, she’s more than that. Or she will be.’ She is genuinely very cute — and I don’t think that’s just a biased mother saying that. But I am wary of that being language that she experiences growing up.”
When Snook was growing up, “no one thought I was attractive. Like, so unattractive in my teenage years, and no boyfriend. And how I interpreted the world was: no one liked me. But what was great about thinking that I was completely abhorrently unattractive was that it was quite useful. I tried to create good character instead.”
The tomboy self-image served her well until her early twenties, when she landed a part in a TV movie as a prisoner of war. “And realistically for the role I had to lose a bunch of weight. And then I remember this guy going, ‘Oh, when did you get hot?’ " It was intended as a compliment, but what she heard was: “Well, I wasn’t hot before. So I must have been disgusting. Therefore I must maintain this shape at all costs, and I’m only worthwhile as an object in the eyes of another person by being a shape that is appreciable to them.”
Her eyes widen. “That’s f***ed-up so bad.” Yet self-loathing still wormed its way into her brain. She was both enraged and corrupted at the same time? “Yeah, totally.”
On her next film a casting agent told her: “We don’t really want you because you’re a nobody, but the director and the writer think you’re good for the role. So what we’ll do is change all of you so that you’re marketable: we’ll whiten your teeth, darken your hair, we’ll give you a personal trainer so you can lose weight and look the part.” Snook meekly agreed. She told herself she was being professional. “In order for me to be successful I have to be all the things that aren’t me.”
Anger edges into her tone. “And then one particular day I had the tiniest bit of chocolate cake.” A producer told her off in front of the entire cast and crew. A costume designer intervened indignantly and told her to keep eating it. “And all the while I am dying inside.”
By now she is looking furious.
“The infantilising of women, to not be able to make their own decisions, why would we do that to women?”
When she looks at old photographs of her twentysomething self, the loveliness to which she was blinded at the time amazes her. “And that’s pretty f***ed-up. And I’d like to hopefully change this for my daughter. If it’s even at all possible.” But praise for her baby’s beauty feels as dangerous to Snook as the thoughtless compliment on her weight loss.
“It’s better to feel like one looks like shit but not to think that it matters, than to feel that one looks beautiful and that that’s your value.”
She never applies digital filters to her cameraphone. Are they our modern-day equivalent of the painting of Dorian Gray? “Absolutely.”
I ask if Wilde’s protagonist’s other temptations resonate equally powerfully. Dorian’s hedonistic adventures lead him into an opium den, but Snook says her own vices are more culinary than narcotic. “I’ve never really been into boundary-pushing or extremism.” She grins. “But I think I’ve got a real problem with a nice gourmet supermarket. And maybe that’s because I couldn’t afford to eat when I was in my twenties.”
The 36-year-old was born into a middle-class family in Adelaide, the youngest of three daughters to a swimming pool salesman and a carer for the elderly. Past press profiles have all reported a happy-go-lucky childhood, but she tells me that in fact, at the age of 11, divorce fractured it profoundly. Her eldest sister was a decade older and had just moved out when their father left. Her other sister, six years older, moved in with her boyfriend. Practically overnight the family of five shrank to just Snook and her mum.
She spent a lot of time alone, watching TV, making up stories in her head, climbing trees. “It was like, well, shut up and put your head down and deal with what the new paradigm is.” No one realised how unhappy she was. “I think I was quite good at showing the cheerful tomboy on the outside.” Unsurprisingly, before long she took up acting.
“Enormously depressed” in her teens, at 18 she won a place at Sydney’s prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art, but with no financial support from her parents she was broke. “I was making $120 a week, rent was $90 and $12 went on my phone. It was certainly character-building.” She lived off white rice. “No wonder I was falling asleep in the history of theatre lessons.” She starts to laugh. “I was always falling asleep in the back row. I was spiking my blood sugar and not eating any protein, I couldn’t afford it. People would take bets on whether I would fall asleep.”
After graduating in 2008 she worked in a café and became “lost”, doubting her own ambition. “Performance and drama and acting have always felt part of my identity. And when the pull to do something is so strong, the fear of not being able to achieve that is also equally strong; the fear that self-worth is not able to be achieved.” Looking back on her twenties now, she thinks she was still depressed. She was down to her last A$10 when work began coming in.
Parts in several small Australian films won her awards, and by 2015 she was a moderately established actress, playing the Apple entrepreneur Andrea Cunningham in the Hollywood biopic Steve Jobs. The following year she made her West End debut alongside Ralph Fiennes in The Master Builder — and then landed the role that would change her life.
Everyone I know who didn’t watch Succession said the same thing: why care about a dysfunctional family of horrible rich siblings competing to get even richer? “That was my reaction too!” she says, laughing. But as the tragedy of the flawed billionaires’ loneliness became more and compelling, she found herself internalising Shiv’s ambition to beat her brothers and take over the family business. By the end Snook was rooting for Shiv to become CEO just as fiercely as her character.
“Of course! You have to. I knew that she wasn’t the best choice, realistically. But you’re in that horse race, you’re backing your own horse.” The actors playing her brothers — Jeremy Strong as Kendall, Kieran Culkin as Roman and Alan Ruck as Connor — felt exactly the same way, she adds.
The irony of a show about the loneliness of wealth is that it has made Snook rich. By season three she was reportedly paid more than US$300,000 per episode. “But it’s been really important for me to remember that it could just fade away. Just,” and she flicks a hand, “poof.” She lives with the possibility that she might be poor again? “Oh, 100 per cent.” Regardless of her bank balance? “Yes! Constantly. Which is why my vice is going to expensive supermarkets because it’s completely irrational to spend 20 bucks on a thing of sprouted crackers. It’s so naughty! Sooo transgressive.”
I wonder if she ever worries that fame and wealth could isolate her. “Well, I think that’s up to me to ensure that I am still able to relate to my own life and other people. Money is shaky stock, like beauty. The things that are important are friendships and family.”
In 2020 Snook had been single for two years when the pandemic struck and she got stuck in Australia. Her home by then was in Brooklyn, and she was back visiting her family across Australia when the country closed its borders. For the first few months of lockdown she stayed with a friend and his pregnant wife, but when their baby was due and the borders still closed, another friend suggested she move in with him. Nine months later they were married.
Snook and Dave Lawson, an Australian actor, had been platonic friends for years. For as long as they had known each other, one or both had always been seeing someone else, and Lawson has a 12-year-old son from a previous relationship. As she describes them falling in love, Snook’s expression fills with light. She cannot stop smiling.
“You know what’s really lovely about it? And what was so confirming about it too, is that because we were friends, the stakes were higher, because we didn’t want to f*** up the friendship. But also, because we were isolated from everybody, we didn’t have to answer to anybody. ‘Why are they leaving the pub together?’ or ‘How is this going to work? He’s got a son and you’ve got a career overseas.’ We were, like, we can work that out. We’re adults.”
I ask who made the first move, but she goes on: “Then the other thing is that I was, like, ‘Well, if this is going to happen, you’re going to have to know everything about me that you don’t already know as a friend. And as a friend I can trust that you’ll be able to hold that safely. Here’s the house, open up every nook and cranny so you can see all that you need to see if this is going to work. Because if it’s not, then we can stop now and you can have seen the house and not want to buy.’ And I think that fosters a deeper trust that fosters a lot of security and love and grace.”
Three months into their romance, Snook proposed.
“For me, marriage was the only way that we could do this. I’ve never felt this with any other relationship, that it needed that sort of hand-on-heart commitment, and marriage was suddenly very important to me, to signify that to the world and to the person who I love.” She needed to formalise the transition from friendship? “Exactly. There needed to be a line in the sand of what this feels like for us.”
Because the shops were still closed under lockdown, she couldn’t buy a ring. Over lunch at home with Lawson and his son, she got down on one knee and asked his son for his permission. “And then out came the scissors, which is a very precious memory.” With one metal handle of a pair of hair scissors looped over her ring finger, on her knee she turned to Lawson and asked him to marry her.
“And then I had to leave two days later to go back into the pandemic in New York to shoot Succession.” He followed a few months later, and in February 2021 the pair married in her Brooklyn backyard. “So, overall,” she laughs, “a pretty tight turnaround.”
With the city still in partial lockdown, she was delighted for the excuse to have a tiny wedding. Their only guests were her housemates and, as a witness, her co-star Ashley Zukerman, who played Succession’s Nate, a political aide with whom Shiv had a brief fling in series one. She made her bouquet that morning, wore her work boots with the hole in the sole and “we had pizza and beer”. When I say it must have been one hell of a year, another grin spreads across her face.
“Oh yeah. Quite huge. You throw everything up like cards and just see how they land.”
At this point Lawson appears at the door with their baby and Snook takes her in her arms. Lawson has been out buying giant bars of Cadbury’s, and a spirited discussion follows about how much nicer it tastes than posh organic chocolate.
Since then Snook has been rehearsing back in Australia. They live in a remote wooden house buried in 35 acres of bush 80km from Melbourne, but the family is now back in London for the duration of the play. She will be breastfeeding throughout the run, on the calculation that this will fortify her daughter’s immune system and make Snook less likely to catch a bug from her. “Don’t get sick, don’t fall over, don’t get sick, don’t get lose your voice,” she murmurs, mantra-like, to herself.
On top of the pressure of being the play’s solitary performer, the absence of energy from any other actors on the stage daunts her. The irony of Succession, a drama about characters incapable of human relationships, was the intense camaraderie of its ensemble cast. “And the irony of doing a one-person show,” she admits, “is that I don’t enjoy being the focus of attention in a way that is not collaborative.”
What will be her strategy? “Well, it’s not about me doing it by myself. It’s the stage manager, it’s the camera people on set, the people changing my costume on set, changing my moustache and my sideburns. If anyone is off, then we all mess up. So the crew will be the cast.”
She tells me about a podcast she heard a few days before we meet featuring a psychologist who had just published a huge piece of research into the key to human happiness. His conclusion would have mystified Shiv Roy or Dorian Gray, but “it really rang true for me. What’s the secret to happiness? What is it? We all want to know, right? And it boiled down to three words. Other people matter.”
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London