Admittedly, Sarah Snook was a bit lukewarm about the idea of hosting a TV show in the middle of her award-winning theatrical onslaught.
It was the year 2024, and the actress was famous and acclaimed for her role as Chef Roy on HBO’s Jesse Armstrong family drama. successionwas declining its production of The Picture of Dorian Gray in London’s West End, where she played 26 separate roles, later earning her both Tony and Laurence Olivier Awards. The show was expected to move to Broadway. So when I approached her It’s all her fault “No, there’s no way I can do this show,” creator Megan Gallagher and executive producer Nigel Marchant recall her often saying, noting that balancing a TV return with Broadway was just a big ask. “Doing this away from home means being away from my family for a very long time,” adds Snook, who at the time had welcomed a daughter with husband Dave Lawson.
But then Gallagher said there was a possibility of filming in Australia, Snook’s native country. That piqued the actress’ interest enough to at least take a look at the script. “When I read it, I said to myself, ‘I’ve never really done the thriller type of a television episode before.’ And the thing that really caught my attention is that there are a lot of plot twists and turns — a good plot is one thing, but you want to stay for the characters, or rewatch the characters, and this one seems to have great character relationships.
And so, with a newborn in hand — and after Gallagher accepted her proposal to read Andrea Mara’s 2021 novel that would be adapted — Snook signed on. It’s all her faultan eight-part series that would become the most-watched original series in Peacock’s history, with 46 million hours of viewing accumulated through the first three weeks of its November release. In the show, she plays Marissa Irvin, an upper-middle-class mother living in an affluent Chicago suburb who goes to pick up her son, Milo (Duke McCloud), from an arranged playdate. The woman who opens the door has never heard of Marissa or Milo, and so begins every parent’s worst nightmare: the frantic search for a missing child.
The show is, in Snoke’s words, “very twisted.” The investigation into Milo’s disappearance – led by kind-hearted detective Jim Alcarras (Michael Peña) – strains Marissa’s marriage to commodities trader Peter (Jake Lacy), as well as her business partnership with her old friend and gambling addict Colin (Jay Ellis). Later in the season, we discover (spoilers!) that the life-changing injury that Peter’s brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), suffered when he was a child, was an intentional hoax by Peter and not their sister, Leah (Abby Elliott), who was made to believe it was her doing and carried that guilt into adulthood. It is also revealed that Josie (Sophia Lillis), the young nanny for mother Jenny (Dakota Fanning), has kidnapped Milo, believing him to be the perfect replacement for her stillborn child, who was killed in an accident around the time Milo was born.
The most common question Snook has been asked so far is why she chose this series next successionThe short answer is that Marissa is not a chef. “There’s crossover — similarities in the financial world, wealth — but in terms of personal personality, they’re very different. Marissa is probably closer to me,” Snook says. “Shiv was very cold,” she adds with a laugh. “This is the person who is charismatic and funny and caring and sees through all the bullshit. …And then let’s see how this person gets through it.” [the] An absolutely surreal experience of losing her child and her husband who turned out to not necessarily be who she thought he was…”
Snook says that was the hardest part about dealing with Marissa, being in a constant state of panic. “It was difficult to ascertain whether there were shades of that sadness and intensity. There are levels of reactivity to fear and context – is it as intense as it needs to be here? Does that offset something that’s more intense later and we don’t actually get the reward?” I found it helpful to rely on wardrobe cues from costume designer Gypsy Taylor, who layered Marissa or dressed her more abstractly, depending on the scene.
Snook admits that coping with that fear “was definitely more accessible to me” after becoming a mother. “I’m not an anxious person in that sense,” she says. “But I think I’ve been able to access the fantasy world more easily… where I can understand the nuance of what it would be like.”
As an executive producer of the series, she was inspired by watching her former bosses. “The thing I really noticed succession What I admired is the people at the top – in particular [creator] Jesse Armstrong and [EP] “Mark Mylod but also all the department heads – with the mindset that there’s not really a hierarchy,” she explains. “There’s a hierarchy in terms of having to get things done, but there’s an equality in the value of people’s work. … You can see the effort that Mark and Jesse have put in, and so you, as an individual who respects them, want to show them how much you believe in the project as well. I think that’s a great tone.”
Snook admits that she is not yet involved in any plans for the show’s potential return. She’s clearly still in disbelief at how popular she is It’s all her fault It has been proven that:[Peacock got] “There’s something like a million subscribers from it, too,” she says, wide-eyed. “I think there’s something we miss a lot about monitoring society when we do it on our phones, independently, on our own. In the end, there’s something really delicious about the cart.”
This story first appeared in the June standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To obtain the magazine, click here to subscribe.
