Shiv f...ing Roy.
After four seasons spent conniving, manipulating and scheming in the toxic family dynamic that is the Waystar Royco empire, tomorrow the sharply-written, blackly comedic, pop culture phenomenon that is Succession draws to a close and with it, comes the final chapter of Logan Roy’s only daughter.
Viewers should, by all accounts, loathe Siobhan. She can be abominable, even in a cast of some truly, deeply awful characters.
And yet.
In the hands of Australian actor Sarah Snook, it takes only for a flash of panic in Shiv’s eyes, for her cutting banter to descend into a vulnerable stammer, for her mask of bravado to slip so we glimpse the damage and fear underneath, and we can’t hate her.
It’s hard to imagine, but there was nearly a world in which Snook is not the iconic Shiv Roy; this pivotal role that has won her Critics Choice Award and a Golden Globe, and for which she is a a hot contender to take out a lead actress category at September’s Emmys.
When she was sent the script, Snook was reluctant to even read for it, she told the UK Telegraph. She had a career in Australia — she wasn’t a household name, but she was proud of her work — and assumed she was being used as a bargaining chip to get a more well-known actor.
“I wasn’t entirely enamoured with the character, I didn’t foresee how I could play her, and didn’t love being the only female in a sea of white men in business suits,” Snook said. “It’s not me, I don’t know that world, I don’t like those kinds of characters, how do I play this? I was OK with the idea of it going away.”
But when show-runner Jesse Armstrong saw her audition, he knew she was the one — he was struck by the blend of intelligence, toughness and humanity she was able to convey, he told the LA Times.
“Suddenly, you go from thinking, ‘oh my God, will there be anyone?’ to ‘oh my God, I hope she hasn’t gotten any offers,’” Armstrong says. “She was the only person in the world who could do all these things at once.”
Ultimately, the show made Snook an offer she couldn’t refuse, and her course was set. She spent the first half of that inaugural season feeling “creeping doubt . . . like a fraud”, she told the Telegraph. She wasn’t sure she had the experience to make it work.
But Snook’s take on Shiv, with its layers of vulnerability and complexity, was the only way the character worked; “in the wrong hands she could seem like a stone-cold bitch”, is the blunt assessment from series co-executive producer Georgia Pritchett. Writer Lucy Prebble said it allowed them to leave things in the script unspoken, because the “highly virtuosic” Snook “can do it with her face”.
From that first season, Succession grew into a bona fide cultural juggernaut, as viewers tuned in to see the Shakespearean drama and acerbic comedy of the gruff, ruthless media magnate Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and which of his three children, wrestling demons including some profound Daddy issues, would take over his entertainment empire.
As Snook spent months sparring with the legendary Cox (catchphrase of “f..k off!”) or ad-libbing with her on-screen brothers, Jeremy Strong (the depressed yet desperate-to-win Kendall Roy) and Keiran Culkin (the vulgar but vulnerable Roman Roy), her nerves gave way to an experience she admits she is not quite ready to let go of.
She found out at a table read in January that Succession’s fourth season would be its last, telling the LA Times she felt “a huge sense of loss, disappointment and sadness”.
“Emotionally, all of us weren’t necessarily ready to be done with the show because we love each other so much,” she says. “But everything has to come to an end, and it’s smart not to let something become a parody of itself.”
Snook leaves Succession a better and more confident actor than she went in, she says, but it took some getting used to.
Much has been made of Strong’s “method” approach — his immersion was so complete that when Cox, famously annoyed by it, told an interviewer Strong contained “a certain amount of pain”, he retorted that the pain was in Kendall, and he hadn’t “really met Brian outside of the confines of that (character)“. Snook tells the Telegraph that Strong asks not to rehearse any scenes, which could be “enormously intimidating”.
But the cast, despite their differences, forged a bond through long and intense hours of filming and through the freedom to improvise beyond what the writers detail in the script. A notable example is the powerful moment in the season three finale when Shiv realises her husband has betrayed her by colluding with Logan; shock, sadness, rage and revulsion all play across her face before she pushes it back inside.
“(Snook) has this amazing ability to harness the great sadness and rage that Shiv has. It’s a skill to be able to keep a lid on it,” Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Shiv’s “striving sycophant” husband, Tom Wambsgans, told the LA Times.
“You glimpse it occasionally as the audience and see the lid being kept firmly on these enormous swirling depths underneath her icy exterior.”
Snook told the Telegraph that Culkin, in particular, excels at improvisation as louche motor-mouth Roman — “once he started, he ran away with it. He described it as a dessert that he didn’t know was all-you-can-eat, and once he did, he just kept going” — while Macfadyen breaks into laughter the easiest, especially if Nick Braun (“Cousin Greg” Hirsch) is involved.
“We’re such a well-oiled machine now, and we trust each other and the creatives in terms of the script and the rhythms of the scenes so that there’s really a fluid basketball game going on,” she said. “Hopefully it comes across in the performance. It’s taught me so much.”
Their last day filming was an emotional one, she remembers. The season was shot out of sequence, so the scene they filmed last had “playfulness and joy and silliness, kind of a sibling-ish play, and that was really fun to do”, she told Entertainment Weekly in March.
“I don’t know if it will make the show because it’s pretty eccentric in some ways. But it was good to do as the last scene. It was really meaningful, and everyone was crying, and clapping, and having all sorts of emotions and feelings, and it was all very sad. And happy as well.”
Multiple interviews with Snook remark on how unlike Shiv she is; she meets the Telegraph journalist in a low-key cafe wearing a T-shift, baseball cap, ancient Blundstones with a hole in them, and a cheery, open demeanour. When the reporter from the LA Times mixes up the spot for their rendezvous, she texts her the right address in Brooklyn and waits patiently, “unfussy and self-deprecating”, wearing a grey hoodie and those weathered boots.
Her quintessentially Australian traits are courtesy of an upbringing in Adelaide; Snook now lives mostly on her rural property outside Melbourne with her husband, actor/comedian Dave Lawson.
Snook grew up the youngest of three sisters; a creative kid, who’d put on plays for her parents’ friends after dinner. But, as she said in a 2014 interview with the Brimbank-Northwest Star Weekly, she was never sure if acting was more than a pastime, even after winning the semi-silly ‘Meryl Streep Drama Award’ when she finished primary school..
“I was very proud of that,” she remembered. “I thought, ‘maybe one day I’ll be her’. My mum said: ‘Well, Sarah, if you try hard enough you might’.”
Her parents split up when she was 11 — her mum, who worked for Disney when she was a child, lived in Adelaide and her father moved to Perth, where he sells swimming pools.
Snook got a performing arts scholarship to Adelaide’s prestigious Scotch College, but still “I didn’t really think I could do it (acting) as a job. I didn’t think [anyone] could do it as a job,” she told the Star Weekly. “My dad said, ‘Do you want to do this as a hobby or a career?’. I was very indignant and said, ‘I want to do this as a career’. And my own pride made me say, ‘OK, I’ve got to do this now’.”
She worked as a fairy at children’s parties in her spare time (“it’s the best training ground for acting because they also will not take any bull....; they won’t believe in it if you don’t,” she told The Australian).
It’s a side hustle she continued after she was accepted to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, with a backup plan to become a teacher if acting was a dead end. But after she graduated, she threw herself into theatre and Australian TV, with guest roles on All Saints, Packed to the Rafters and the ABC drama Sisters of War (for which she won the 2012 AACTA Award for best lead actress in a television drama).
In 2013, she appeared in Zac Hilditch’s apocalypse film, These Final Hours, which was shot in Perth (Snook told the Star Weekly that when her father saw the billboard, he was “very excited”), followed by the sci-fi Predestination with Ethan Hawke in 2015 (which Variety called “an extraordinary breakout performance”) and Steve Jobs, and The Dressmaker, both with Kate Winslet, in 2015.
When she looks back on Shiv in season one of Succession, Snook tells the LA Times that she is struck by how she had changed.
“There was a girlishness to Shiv back then, but she has transformed into a woman,” she said, “and that reflects my own journey as part of the series.”
Snook has also used the platform that has come with her role on Succession to speak out about Hollywood beauty standards, telling Vogue Australia that she often thinks about working out to look “like a movie star” but “every time, I’m like: ‘Can I really be f..... subscribing to an unrealistic beauty standard that then perpetuates and makes more women unhappy because they feel like they can’t attain something that’s not actually realistic anyway?’”
The next of Snook’s acting projects is Run Rabbit Run, a psychological horror film she shot in Adelaide, which drops on Netflix on June 28. But for now, her career is taking a pause; Snook is due any day with her first child.
Hers is a pandemic love story; she and Lawson were long-time platonic friends who found themselves locked down together in Melbourne in 2020 — and saw each other from a new perspective.
”The world-is-ending, apocalypse kind of chaos forces you to be vulnerable,” she told the LA Times, of their surprise romance.
Snook told Vogue that she proposed, and the couple got married the following February in a tiny ceremony in the snowy backyard of her home in Brooklyn; the witness was fellow Australian actor Ashley Zukerman, aka Shiv’s former lover Nate Sofrelli.
Snook wore a vintage Chloe velvet jacket and — you guessed it — her Blundstones.
The segue from one life-changing experience into another is not lost on Snook. “I’m very fortunate in that I’m not (leaving) the best job I’ve ever done and then turning around into a vacuum of no work and unemployment,” she told Entertainment Weekly.
“I’ve got a baby coming, so one door closes, another door flies itself wide open. I’m quite happily moving on to the next thing. I’ve got a pretty big (project) on my plate coming up, so I’m not entertaining anything else just yet.”
And what of the finale of the show that changed her life? It’ll be no surprise to anyone who has watched to hear that it’s not going to be happily-ever-after.
“I think just like the Roys, who will never be happy, even if they get what they want, the audience may not be happy with it, even if they get what they want,” she told Forbes. “It is a both satisfying and dissatisfying ending, which is kind of perfect, I think.”
The final episode of Succession airs on May 29 on Binge