july 8–21, 2019 | new york 57to go into the TV-film stuff. You know, in
little old Adelaide ... to pretend to be other
people for a living.” And yet here she is.
Despite having already won two AACTA
awards—a kind of Australian equivalent of
the Oscars and Emmys—when she was
auditioning for Succession, she told GQ
that she assumed, “Eh, this is out of my
league. I’ll just come and do it and get out
of here. Free trip to L.A. for a weekend and
see my friends. This’ll be great.”
At another point, she tells me, “I peaked
way too soon. Did all the things: I’ve been
the lead female and the lead male and
female in a real character piece. With, like,
an amazing lead actor opposite”—a refer-
ence to Predestination. “So I really just ...
ruined myself now,” she jokes. In any case,
“one of my best mates went and saw [Pre-
destination] in the cinema, and two women
apparently in front of him, at the end, were
like, ‘Oh, that was great. Jodie Foster was
amazing as a man.’ Was that a compliment
to her or to me? Or an insult?” Snook seems
to be having enough fun to get away with a
hint of underplayed modesty.
Season one of Succession ends with Shiv’s
marriage to Tom, a smitten social climber
played with furious beta-maleness by Mat-
thew Macfadyen. Theirs is one of the most
interesting dynamics on TV right now, and
Snook plays it with a disciplined mix of arro-
gant disregard and guarded vulnerability.
Shiv seems to adore Tom as an inferior,
casually toying with him like a cat. What
other character would, on her wedding day,
admit to her doting new husband—who has
just declared, “I know that you’re hard and
you’re tough, but I want to be in. I want to be
in on you”—that she’s been having an affair?
And that it likely won’t be her last? “I’m just
not sure I’m a good fit for a monogamous
marriage,” Shiv says. Snook’s performance is
discomfiting; Shiv is being honest about her
brutally contradictory needs. Snook makes
you empathize with Shiv, even as her char-
acter lacks much empathy for anyone else.
“I get asked this question a lot: Does she
love Tom?” Snook says. (She herself is single,
having recently gotten out of an eight-year
relationship.) “Or, like, why is she with Tom?
And I feel like, really down deep, he’s the
only one who’ll always be there uncondi-
tionally. She could treat him like dirt, and
actually she probably has a great wealth of
love and respect for him, but it’s far too vul-
nerable to show that. There’s not a lot of
physical affection between Tom and Shiv,
which is not something that we’d planned
on ... It just sort of happened that way, and
then it seemed to be the right choice.”
Macfadyen, for his part, loves the abuse.
One of his favorite scenes takes place in a car
right before their wedding, as Tom floats theidea of his taking her last name. “She gives
me this look as if I have three heads,” he tells
me, laughing. “It’s delicious.”
Armstrong says he invented Shiv in part
because she worked as a political consul-
tant and “I wanted an easy way into the
political sphere.” Plus it helped to have
someone in the family “not involved in the
day-to-day mechanics of the firm,” which
gave her some ability to see the nutty pro-
ceedings from a slight remove (which per-
haps also explains how Shiv’s WTF side-
eye became so iconic). He adds, however,
that this is “a quite mechanical way of
thinking of her,” and explains that “the idea
of accumulation and spending of capital:
emotional business capital,” runs through-
out Succession. And Shiv is the “uncatch-
able fish,” a master of accruing such power.
That aloofness is part of why her father,
Logan, respects her despite her not being a
boy. “He has his prejudices, but he also has
a brutal regard for people who are effective.
Effectiveness trumps other prejudices.”
Cox, who plays Logan, tells me that Shiv
is his character’s “precious one, the one he
adores.” This next season, “Shiv’s viability
is constantly tested,” he says. “And she con-
stantly trumps her rivals.”
Snook wants to tell me a story about
meeting Patti Smith—“I summoned her
like a shaman”—that she seems to think
explains a lot about how her life works, and
works out. It goes back a few years, when
Snook was just out of nida (from which
she graduated in 2010 and—remember—
for which she auditioned with a Smithmonologue). She was 25 or 26 and had
filmed The Dressmaker with Kate Winslet
before being cast in Steve Jobs (both came
out in 2015). She read a biography of Judi
Dench over Christmas and was thinking,
Fuck, I want to do theater. How do I go
about this? “I just said to the universe, ‘I
want to do theater,’ ” she says. She’d gone to
the U.K. for her sister’s wedding, and her
agent called and asked, “Can you go for a
read since you’re in London?” The meeting
with the casting director was at a hotel near
Covent Garden. And though she hadn’t
done theater since she was in an
Australian-seaside production, she got the
part, opposite Ralph Fiennes in The Master
Builder. Such good luck “shouldn’t be
allowed; it’s silly,” she says convincingly.
And here’s where the universe being open
to her doing well comes back into the pic-
ture: When she was doing the play, her boy-
friend gave her Patti Smith’s memoir M
Train, and one day as she read the book, she
realized that Smith had not only stayed in
the same hotel in which Snook was cast but
had been, according to the memoir, reading
The Master Builder at the time, in the same
library room she’d been cast in. Spooky!
But there’s more: Later, in her dressing
room, she was relating this story to a
friend—when there was a knock at the
door. It was Patti Smith. Snook and her
friend must have seemed shocked, because
Smith looked at them as if they were up to
no good. “She goes, ‘You all right?’ ” Snook
remembers. “And then she drifts off into
PHOTOGRAPH: COLIN HUTTON/HBO the night.” ■
Sarah Snook with Matthew Macfadyen.