56 new york | july 8–21, 2019
The CULTURE PAGES
At the end of the first season, the char-
acter, who worked outside the family
business as a political consultant, oper-
ated as more of an acerbic observer, a one-
woman Statler and Waldorf to the farcical
family scrum. But when the show returns
in August, the narrative spotlight will be
more on Shiv. “From the first episode” of
season two, “people can see that Shiv is
going to be more central,” confirms the
show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong. This
time around promises to have Shiv bully-
ing her way past her rivals, including her
feckless brothers, Kendall (the needy
druggie struggling to be the Man, played
by Jeremy Strong) and Roman (the bro-
ken ADD jester struggling to shirk all
responsibility while maintaining his
princeling status, played by Kieran
Culkin). Not to mention her mysterious
stepmother, Marcia, played by Hiam
Abbass, and various outside corporate
threats. The question of the show’s title is
who will inherit the crown tottering on
the head of the right-wing warrior- mogul
and patriarch Logan Roy, played by Brian
Cox, who is losing his marbles.
But for all the comparisons to Elisabeth
Murdoch and Shari Redstone and others
that give the character seeming topicality,
it’s Snook’s slyly selfish portrayal of her that
makes Shiv so compelling. You might have
missed Snook in the 2014 Ethan Hawke
sci-fi film Predestination, in which she
played a time-traveling intersex detective
named the Unmarried Mother (the plot’s
a bit confusing to summarize, but—
spoiler—Snook had to watch Hawke’s
movies from the 1990s to understand how
to walk as he did as a young man), and it
might take a second to recall her as Apple’s
relentless PR person in 2015’s Steve Jobs
or, the next year, as a storm trooper hunt-
ing the genetically inferior in the Black
Mirror episode “Men Against Fire,” and,
let’s face it, most of us didn’t make it to
London in 2016 to see her perform oppo-
site Ralph Fiennes in The Master Builder.
But her Shiv is impossible to forget.
When we meet in Greenpoint, Snook is
dressed in a jean jacket, white-framed mir-rored sunglasses, and Docs, without a hint
of don’t-you-know-who-I-am (and nobody
seemed to). We sit in the backyard of a
mutedly fussy café with monkey-and-bird
wallpaper, “BOWLS!” on the menu, and a
pressed-tin ceiling. She lets me order us a
large slice of cake and proceeds to tell me
her wry, somewhat giddy life story.
Snook might portray a derisive avatar of
the impatient, overcooked ruling class, but
she is not of that world. She grew up in
Adelaide, which is where, incidentally, the
Murdochs got their start owning newspa-
pers. She’s the daughter of a swimming-pool salesman and an elder-care provider,
and her first gig in showbiz—if you can call
it that—was playing a fairy at children’s
birthday parties.
“My maternal grandmother was British,”
Snook says, “and she immigrated to New
Zealand by accident,” after being stuck in
South Africa just as World War II was start-
ing. She had been an actress in London dur-
ing the 1930s. So acting was in Snook’s
blood? “It skipped a generation,” she says,
but what didn’t was a sense of adventure.
When her grandmother died, she left money
for Snook’s mother to go traveling, and she
met Snook’s father in Papua New Guinea.
The couple “bred these three adventurous
women,” Snook and her sisters, who ended
up scattered around the globe (one lives in
London, the other in Papua New Guinea).
After Snook’s parents divorced, her
mother ran a boardinghouse adjacent to
the school her sisters went to, which Snook
refused to attend because it was girls only.
Instead, she got a partial scholarship to a
school with a solid performing-arts pro-
gram. One of her teachers encouraged her
to apply to the National Institute for the
Dramatic Art, Australia’s version of Juil-
liard. Her application was a speech of Por-
tia’s from The Merchant of Venice (“The
quality of mercy is not strained; / It drop-
peth as the gentle rain from heaven”) as well
as something Patti Smith did in Cowboy
Mouth. Initially, she didn’t get in; a place for
her opened up after someone dropped out.
(“I tracked him down and broke his leg,” she
says jokingly, though it’s probably what Shiv
would hire someone to do.)
There is a certain charmed, woke-
backpacker aspect to Snook. Her Insta-
gram has lots about how bad plastic is
(“Every piece of plastic ever created still
exists on the planet today,” she’s posted—
she’s not wrong about that). Just after the
2016 election, she declared, “Forgive me,
I’m jet-lagged. This is a nightmare, right?
Wake me when the Kardashians are in
control of the U.N.” Early this year, on Aus-
tralia Day, she posted a tart, wan Aborigi-
nal fable about the irony of celebrating
colonization. (“So ... my house got broken
into. And then they stayed. Weird, huh?
They let me stay, too, but I’m sort of in the
corner of the living room, near the back
door?”) You could imagine her supporting
a real-life Gil Eavis, the leftist politician
Shiv is trying to co-opt/get elected.snook seems delighted that things are
working out as well as they have so far, and
she prefers to process her success by fram-
ing it as various things the universe has
bestowed on her. Thinking back, she says,
“It didn’t really seem accessible or feasibleShiv roy would so not put up with this. “Did you know
that AT&T doesn’t work in Greenpoint? It’s like you literally cross past
McCarren Park and then it cuts out,” says Sarah Snook, who plays the skepti-
cal, implacable, yet oddly sympathetic media heiress Shiv Fucking Roy (as
the character puts it on her wedding day, while wearing her wedding dress,
to her side piece, Nate, who dared challenge her on one of her schemes) on
the HBO series Succession. But I’m meeting Snook far from the show’s usual
corporate-power-and-family-money locations. On a day when they aren’t
filming, the 31-year-old Australian expat wanted to get lunch near her
apartment in tweeist Brooklyn. She’s been living there while filming the
show’s second season, with two roommates—a married couple, good friends
of hers—her ukulele, and, apparently quite happily, no reliable cell signal.
“I’ve really committed to the artisanal lifestyle,” she says.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: STYLING BY DIANA TSUI; MAKEUP BY NANCY SEA SILER AT ART DEPARTMENT USING CHANEL BEAUTÉ; HAIR BY HELEN REAVEY AT MANAGEMENT + ARTISTS USING ACT+ACRE. ON SNOOK: POLO RALPH LAUREN COTTON JUMPSUIT, $498 AT RALPHLAUREN.COM.“I get asked this
question a lot:
Does she love Tom?
Or, like, why is she
with Tom?”