Sarah Snook
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And that was at a time when nobody had ever said anything like that to me before, that I could be in movies or I could be in plays or I could make things that mattered to me happen. I had come from a very different environment. I'd been working on and off as an actor in Los Angeles. I'd been working since I was 12.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I was emancipated at 15 and living on my own for about, I don't know, half a year or something before I got Dawson's Creek. And so I was coming from Los Angeles and this sort of idea of, you know, if you can get a national commercial, it'll last you a year. And that's what I wanted for myself. If you could get on a TV show, you could support yourself. And that's what I wanted for myself.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And then I went to New York City and I thought I was introduced to this whole other expression of the medium that I'd never been exposed to, I think, before. And growing up, I'd just seen The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins and things like that. I didn't really know what was possible. And then I started to make New York City home. I did my first play there when I was 18.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And it became the place that I would spend the summers and the weekends and just kind of a place that I thought, oh, I could make a life for myself here.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I am constantly confronted by the things that I don't know and real gaps where information should be. Geography. Geography. Okay, yeah. I could go on and on. But I think maybe that's why work has become, you know, that's my conduit to the world. That's my, this is the thing that I've spent the most time trying to gain an understanding of and why it was so important to me because
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Without it, I really had nothing to show for myself. I had no institution behind me that said, I accredit you in this particular way. And so then where do you get a good feeling about yourself? So my work has meant so much to me because it's been, it was where I got to know myself.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And I thought, well, maybe if I could get a little bit good at this thing, I could get a little bit of that self-esteem back.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I see this as an acknowledgment of what is possible when a woman is trusted to discern her own needs, feels safe enough to voice them, and respected enough that they'll be heard. When I asked for more dance classes, I heard yes. More voice lessons, yes. A different wig, a pair of fake teeth not made out of rubber, yes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And all of these things, they require effort and they cost more money, but my bosses never presumed to know better than I did about what I needed in order to do my job and honor Gwen Verdon. And so I want to say thank you so much to FX and to Fox 21 Studios for supporting me completely and for paying me equally because they understood...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Because they understood that when you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value. And then where do they put that value? They put it into their work. And so the next time a woman, and especially a woman of color, because she stands to make 52 cents on the dollar compared to her white male counterpart...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
tells you what she needs in order to do her job, listen to her, believe her, because one day she might stand in front of you and say thank you for allowing her to succeed because of her workplace environment and not in spite of it. Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
LESLIE KENDRICK My hands are like this. My heart is like this. And I was pregnant at the time. And so, you know, also experiencing that. But I felt so connected in that moment to have had these experiences that allowed me to be the conduit for the message.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
We're not where I thought we would be. The opportunities of those moments of the Me Too movement, of the Black Lives Matter movement, I hope that they are underground and that they will come back and that there will be a resurgence of the optimism and the momentum that we were enjoying.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah. Get it. Right. Get it. It belongs to you. And that humor is not a way to... make a joke in a sad situation, that humor is a way to make something whole and complete and also a way to remember something better. You know, when we don't want to remember the sad times, we want to remember the good times, the happy times. And so if you can find a
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
There's a line from a poet that I like, the light underbelly of the dark, dark beast. You will be able to transport yourself back to those moments and relive them and be there with them. So the reclamation of humor, especially in the acknowledgement or the insistence on looking for it, on finding it, because it's there. It just needs to be found.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
So the insistence on continuing to find the humor, but most of all, the pleasure, because they can't take that away from us.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Well, I was pregnant at the time. And I think I was like seven months or something. And, you know, my first baby. And so that kind of
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
ignorance is bliss kind of world of what is to come and the efforts of parenting at the same time as doing this particular show was um if i had seen the show i think my husband particularly if he'd seen the show he would have said this is not this is not a good idea this is not something you do if you have a newborn this is not possible i mean it's not impossible obviously but um it takes a lot of concentration and support not just from myself from from the family and from my team
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
How am I going to go back to just playing one character? I don't know what comes after this, what tops this sort of overstimulation of characters. To differentiate between the characters, I think lots of different things. In some ways, a blessing and a curse. We had only two weeks of rehearsals before doing the pre-recorded portion of the show at the end of 2023.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And so it really meant that I had to make... sharp and considered decisions quite early. And part of that was created out of doing a lot of voice work with Geraldine Cook, my voice coach in Australia, and working on what timbre and tone and pitch and speed, pace, et cetera, each of the characters had, and accent, as well as what physicality came from that. It's very much a physical thing.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I'm too young, and it sucks, okay? I haven't done anything with my life. I actually don't know what I like or what I want. I've never even had an orgasm with another person. And now I'm going to die. Okay.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
sensation of each character sits somewhere differently in my body.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I think the process of finding it in the body with the voice and the physicality really helped because when I come to perform them you know the Basil for instance is very the tone of his voice or the The temper of his voice, perhaps, is quite brittle.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Basil Hallward, yeah. He's the artist. So he sort of sits quite on the gum ridge, just behind the teeth. And there's something centralized, I guess. Like, it's very focused down and right. It's hard to explain, actually, now that I'm thinking about it. And there's quite an obvious clue for Lord Henry where... the narrator says, said Lord Henry languidly.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
So there's quite an expansive quality to Lord Henry. There's something that's very somewhat like molasses, like he's very juicy. And also something about aristocratic British men who are able to hold court and speak widely on subjects. Lord Henry has quite a deep voice, but they actually have quite a range of pitch in their voices.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And if you listen to Stephen Fry, he's talking up right at the top level of his pitch and then right down at the bottom in the same sentence. And it really holds your attention. And that was something we really wanted to find for Lord Henry.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
It absolutely was. It was such a strange thing to have as a reference, like a real body reference, really, from my childhood of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, which, weirdly enough, I think Miriam Margulies
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
read one of the characters or one of the poems and when I met her I didn't realize this until I'd until I was thinking about the Roald Dahl's uh element of it all and went back I was like oh man I should have told her that she was such an inspiration to me as a kid through her voice through the the ability like how her storytelling and characters really spoke to me when I was a kid
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah, it's really strange. It's really strange because, well, what it does, particularly because I can't see myself ever, really. There's only once that I can see myself, which is the character of Alan Campbell. But otherwise, I just have to listen to the audio recording aspect of it because I'm either back of stage or I'm in front of the screen or I'm behind the screen. I can't
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I can't interact with it in that way. It really forces you to listen to what the person is saying, to what I'm saying, and forces you to be really imaginative, really engage with your imagination and how that makes you feel and what. what words are springing out to you tonight and what parts of the tone or how it's been delivered are springing out.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And maybe that's come from, yeah, listening to audiobooks when I was a kid a lot and having that imagination sustained in that way.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah, they'll just keep going. They're the worst kind of actors that I'm working with. They don't wait for you. They don't wait for me at all. They'll just barrel on, and if I don't keep up, it's my fault. Yeah, I mean, the hardest one of that is the Lord Henry...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
sequence in the dinner party scene where there's seven and you're playing all those seven other guests yeah how many is it dorian two three four five six six i think um yeah i'm all of the it's all me you're playing all the other guests yes but you know like i don't I don't think of them as me at all.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah, I mean, it is a lot of fun to do. And the narrator really is, in a sense, Oscar Wilde. You know, I'm not playing him as a character, but there is his energy and his wit is definitely infused naturally into that role because it is the character based on the prose of the book. You know, Kip's turned a Victorian novel into... a play and a Victorian novel that wasn't meant to be read out loud.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
It wasn't like a Dickens or anything like that. It was meant to be read and in episodic form in a way. So it's somewhat difficult to turn that into dialogue as well as into something that is accessible to an audience now. And part of creating that has been to keep the wit that Oscar Wilde has inherently in that text.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I think because I personally don't have any experience by association or proximity with wealth at that level. But I also didn't understand the show so much. And I didn't at that time want to be a secondary kind of handbag character to the men in the show who were going to be I think billions had just come out and I was like, oh yeah, I can see that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
It's straight white men in business and there's no room for me there. So I don't think I'll have a very interesting through line and maybe I don't think I'm going to get this role anyway. So I don't want to audition. And my friend, I was auditioning for something else and already had hair and makeup on, which is such an effort when you're doing self-tapes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I don't know, other people might not think it is, but I find it a real effort doing a self-tape in the first place. But I was doing a self-tape for something else. And so my friend did just, just read the lines, just, let's just have fun. Let's just try and do it. And I am forever grateful for her.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I don't know. I mean, there probably was a level of insouciance or attitude about not feeling right for this and like, you know, without using it as a succession word, F you for making me audition for this when I, you know, I'm not right for this. Like that's a bit shiv to be honest.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Are there similarities? Yeah. Yeah, there are similarities. I mean, very different in terms of the specificity required for Dorian and the fluidity allowed in succession. But something about the proximity of cameras and the kind of subtextual or subconscious awareness of them as a character is in both Succession and Dorian has been really useful to have experienced that in Succession.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
It was never like they are definitely a character and we're going to dramaturgically make them feel like that. But just the presence of, you know, like Gregor, one of the camera operators, at one point he was on the other side of the couch I was doing the scene. He's behind my back on the other side of the couch. I look over. Yep, he's still behind me on the other side of the couch.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And within three seconds, I turn and throw another line back over my shoulder and he's right behind me. He has crossed the couch somehow. He's like leapt over it with a camera in hand. And that kind of agility from the camera operators, both in Dorian and Succession, is very similar.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah, in some sense, yeah. We would do a director's rehearsal and we would know the approximate areas that we would need to be in. And then the camera operators with direction from...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
the cinematographer and the director would be telling them, you know, be in this, okay, double down on that line, keep going, or, you know, do a crash zoom to here or there, like being in the right areas and the right spots. We would tend to light the room for the scene or light one side and then the other side.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
So there was no like coming down the line, set up, set up, set up, changing the lights each, each shot, each frame. Um, It was very just... Yeah, a lot of freedom in that way of working, and I loved it. It was great. It meant that the scenes really had a lot of energy between the characters and that we, in that particular way of working, we had a lot of...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
space to fill in the gaps I think and that was where you know the camera operators and the DP knew okay well we know that Sarah's in the corner on this in this setup but actually she's been told you know as is always the case in succession you're likely to be on camera so have an opinion on everything like you know just be acting you can't just sit back and relax for a moment.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And that kind of attention to what's happening in front of you is really fun to work with, but then also was really valuable for transitioning onto something like Dorian because you're never sitting back. You're never, oh, I'm not on camera so I can just switch off for a second. You're always on. You're on stage. You're always on.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah, I mean, sometimes it just came out of me as Sarah and feeling like I couldn't compete in the level of like comedy, humor or improv that Kieran at the level that he's able to deliver. So half the time it was like, I just keep my mouth shut and have an opinion that I'll keep to myself. The camera will pick it up.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And that sort of somewhat developed into a character choice as much as it was an acting choice, an actor's choice. But yeah, I think it's right for her, though, as the younger sister of oftentimes a room full of men. You're just kind of like, all right, let me watch my stupid older brother and my even stupider older brother and my even stupider older brother.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
fight themselves out and tear themselves down and get themselves into a knot. And then here I am, Dad. You know, I've just been sitting here. You know, there's a cunningness and a cunning quality to Shiv and a part of that is just being the observer and waiting her turn.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And I went back to listen to it for a second time to try and figure out why it had this power over me. And then there I was on the floor again with no sense of what had really just happened. And I listened to the podcast in tandem with reading the first, the pilot episode written by Liz Merriweather and Kim Rosenstock.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And those companion pieces for me cast such a spell that I immediately, for reasons that I couldn't understand and were beyond me, knew that I wanted to make this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I think it's a lot of things, but if I could put one pin in it, it would be that it's possible to be both scared and brave at the same time. And that's what I think moved me so much about Molly's journey and this best friendship.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Yeah, it was like when you were a kid, you know, and you would call your best friend and say, what are we doing? You know, the black t-shirt and the white shorts. And that's how we showed up. I knew that we would part and come back together. You know, we had this reading, this moment, but already the connection was made and we We knew that we would go down this road together.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And the sweet, very sweet ending to the story is she's moving to Brooklyn where I live and Liz lives.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I'm thinking of all the friends that I've lived with in what really felt like a commune for a while. There was a period of my life where we had room to share, and my friends came to make our house feel like a home. One of my best friends, Daphne, we slept in the same bed for years, and another friend, Jeremy, lived downstairs, and then their friends would be there.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
The consideration of one's own pleasure was not in the conversation when I was coming of age. It was, first of all, you shouldn't do it. If you have to, you'll probably suffer a tragedy, get sick, or die.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
It was a kind of like a real open-door policy to create a sense of community.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
So the thing that I'm always looking for, and I think the reason that I go to work is to expand my sense of freedom and that the moments between action and cut, that is a very safe space because nothing bad can truly happen there. The worst that can happen to me is that I feel embarrassed. But that's not going to destroy me, nor is it going to stop me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
So I have to continue to tell myself that that is my time to get free. And that's kind of my mantra, get free, get free, get free. And so I return again to that idea of it is possible to be both scared and brave at the same time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
So I had to tell myself that a lot before those scenes and really hold on to this idea of relaxation, expansion, and freedom.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Same, same. The consideration of one's own pleasure is was not in the conversation when I was coming of age. It was, listen, first of all, you shouldn't do it. But if you have to, you'll probably suffer a tragedy, get sick, or die. So it seemed pretty scary and loaded. And it's certainly taken me a long time To unpack. And I just, I do believe that things will be different for my daughter.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Oh, say more. What do you mean? I see her generation and their radical acceptance of each other and themselves. And I see them working together with more equality than certainly what I was raised with. Look, I hope I'm not just talking about Brooklyn.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I just think, oh, she's just light years ahead of where I maybe even am. She teaches me. And she is proud of me and accepting of me. And even this show, she's like, you go, mom. Or like I did a magazine cover that was racy. And she said, you look amazing. And so I don't know if it's cultural. I don't know if it's familial. I don't know if it's title.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I don't know if it's – but I'm seeing a rapid push in developmental readiness as it relates to my daughter.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Well, that was the period of time in my life when there were sort of multiple people going in and out of that house. Like I referenced my friend Daphne. We shared a bedroom and a closet and a bathroom. And then Jeremy was there. My sister was there. We had a name. I think maybe Jeremy came up with it. And he called it Fort Awesome.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And it was like Pippi Longstocking or something, something what you imagine as a child, you know, you imagine this place where you could go and you could make some of the rules and you would be together and there would be, it would be full of fun and play and ideas and personalities and acceptance and love and
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
He had sort of imagined this place as a child that he, his child mind, would call Fort Awesome. And he said, I think that was kind of like what that time was. It was like Fort Awesome.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Exactly. Um, that was, that's my friend. That's who I've known for a long time. That's who I know now and raise my children with great proximity to his children. But that at the heart of what he does and who he is, that maybe you don't get to witness if you don't know him in the way that I do, is this delight in play. So he would be engaged for as long as Matilda was.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Want it to be on fairy princesses or tea parties or dress up.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Well, something that happened to me when I was making that show is that I met Mary Beth Peel, who played my Grams. And Mary Beth Peel is an esteemed, beloved New York stage actress. And she showed me plays. And then I started going up to New York City. I would get in my car in North Carolina, and I would drive 12 hours for the weekend. By yourself? By myself.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
I would go see a movie and a play and walk this little stretch of 6th Avenue, and then I would get in my car and drive 12 hours home. And what I started seeing when I got to New York City were ideas of things that I would like to be a part of. And then I had this woman, Mary Beth, who was encouraging me and saying that I should try and that she thought that I could.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Coming down the line, set up, set up, set up, changing the lights each shot, each frame. It was very just – yeah, a lot of freedom in that way of working. And I loved it. It was great. It meant that the scenes really had a lot of energy between the characters and that we – in that particular way of working, we had a lot of – space to fill in the gaps, I think.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And that was where, you know, the camera operators and the DP knew, okay, well, we know that Sarah's in the corner on this, in this setup, but actually she's been told, you know, as is always the case in succession, you're likely to be on camera. So have an opinion on everything, like, you know, just be acting. You can't just sit back and relax for a moment.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And that kind of attention to what's happening in front of you is really fun to work with, but then also was really valuable for transitioning onto something like Dorian because you're never sitting back. You're never, oh, I'm not on camera so I can just switch off for a second. You're always on. You're on stage. You're always on.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah. I mean, sometimes it just came out of me as Sarah and feeling like I couldn't compete in the level of like comedy, humor or improv that Kieran at the level that he's able to deliver. So half the time it was like, I just keep my mouth shut and have an opinion that I'll keep to myself. The camera will pick it up.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And that sort of somewhat developed into a character choice as much as it was an acting choice, an actor's choice. But yeah, I think it's right for her, though, as the younger sister of oftentimes a room full of men. You're just kind of like, all right, let me watch my stupid older brother and my even stupider older brother and my even stupider older brother.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
fight themselves out and tear themselves down and get themselves into a knot. And then here I am, Dad. You know, I've just been sitting here. You know, there's a cunningness and a cunning quality to Shiv and a part of that is just being the observer and waiting her turn.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Like, it's so cringy and heartfelt and gross and wonderful. Like, it's just like, what? It's, yeah. Wow.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's the sort of the funny thing about this show and the writing in the show. I would be hard pressed to know which parts were improvised and which parts weren't. But I would suggest that most of the like the oofs and the no's and the interstitial kind of moments, I always felt that those were improvised.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And that was the beauty of it, where we could be live and real and expressive without worrying about going over someone else's line for sound or for stitching them up for reacting too loud or whatever it was, which gave everything a lot of aliveness and energy.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Well, I was pregnant at the time. And I think I was like seven months or something. And, you know, my first baby. And so that kind of
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
It was challenging in its expectations, but rewarding because of that. I think the challenges were we were all on a boat in the East River. I can't remember if that was docked at that point. I think we were docked at that point. But you know, you're on a boat, you're at close quarters. Mark had decided as a group with Jesse and everybody to shoot that sequence as like a one take.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And so each time we did that scene, it was a 29 minute take from that room and then up onto the next level, following Jeremy up, Kendall up, and then coming back down. And then we would go up into the top level room and Yeah, it was hard. It was hard. We shot it over two days, though, that sort of sequence.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
ignorance is bliss kind of world of what is to come and the efforts of parenting at the same time as doing this particular show was um if i had seen the show i think my husband particularly if he'd seen the show he would have said this is not this is not a good idea this is not something you do if you have a newborn this is not possible i mean it's not impossible obviously but um it takes a lot of concentration and support not just from myself from from the family and from my team
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, I made a choice to do that on this one particularly because... particularly on that discovery moment, the lines that Jesse had written. This particular speech, I really wanted to learn exactly as he'd written with all the ellipses and the hyphens and the stuttered thoughts. I wanted to do it exactly as it was because it was so simple, the way he'd created that.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And I really could see that there were thoughts that she couldn't finish and there were things that were too difficult to be said. And she's going between all these sort of emotions. And
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Like, I'm going to get dehydrated in a sort of practical sense because I'm going to be crying and I'm not going to be refueling enough with water. I'm going to get desensitized to the fact of my father dying. So I was doing stupid stuff to actively put myself into a different space.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And part of that came from being inspired by working with a young actress called Lily Latour in Australia on a film called Run, Rabbit, Run. And Dealing with really heavy things and dealing with really big scenes and seeing her ability to go into the scene, to be fully present, fully active, and then because she was using her imagination, because she was a kid, when they called cut, she was out.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
She was doing cartwheels, she was doing other things. It was a real eye-opening moment to go like, oh, we're elastic. If you work hard enough, you can be elastic. If you lean on your imagination enough, you can come in and you can come out. You just have to be...
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
maybe as an adult, mindful of how you do it because you don't want to shortchange your performance, but to trust that there is that ability to do that.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
That's so weird to listen to, hearing it back. I feel so sorry for them because you can hear it from more of an objective side. You're like, oh, no, you're such broken people. Yeah, filming that was so fun working with Matthew. He's so present and generous as an actor. He's so giving. but we rehearsed a little bit the night before, and so when we came in, it was really just like in us, I guess.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And all the kind of the well of pent-up aggression, the things that we've never been able to yell at each other or been able to say as Shiv and Tom was really there, like all the, oh, it's really just deep subterranean in them and really fun to have a go at each other because they don't argue well.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
As a couple, they never really had good arguments that would clear the air or see another person's point of view. But here, they really go for each other's throats. And that was really fun. I mean, I think I just told everyone that I was pregnant as Sarah at that point.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah. It's just a horrible, horrible scene. And so, again, so well written. And that's the wonderful bedrock of this show.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, it was very picturesque. And I felt rural. But looking at it now and looking on Google Maps, it's like 30 minutes from the center of the city. It's so close to the center of the city. It's crazy. But this national park is so beautiful. I guess Australia has a real wonderful blurred line between nature and metropolis or city.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah. At one point, she was distributing Disney VHS, so she got to bring home a bunch of those, and I loved them. I really just repeated those all the time. I had... Snow White, Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Lion King, Aladdin, just on repeat in my house, yeah.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
How am I going to go back to just playing one character? I don't know what comes after this, what tops this sort of overstimulation of characters. To differentiate between the characters, I think lots of different things. In some ways, a blessing and a curse. We had only two weeks of rehearsals before doing the pre-recorded portion of the show at the end of 2023.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, you know, there's a part of me, the feminist in me is like, oh, but if you watch Disney films, you might end up wanting to be
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
a princess and being saved by a prince and a princess can save herself you know like sure I mean that that is true but also I grew up watching those films and I was the one who came out of that going like great I want to be the genie I want to be Jafar I want to be a Yago I want to be Ursula I want to be Scar I want to be Simba I want to be all the like the characters who go and do stuff and who are funny and strange and weird and get great musical numbers
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And so it really meant that I had to make... sharp and considered decisions quite early. And part of that was created out of doing a lot of voice work with Geraldine Cook, my voice coach in Australia, and working on what timbre and tone and pitch and speed, pace, et cetera, each of the characters had, and accent, as well as what physicality came from that. It's very much a physical thing.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
sensation of each character sits somewhere differently in my body.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, I don't know how I keep them straight. Someone asked me actually the other day, have you ever gotten them confused? And I said no, because it was true. And since then, I have twice gotten them confused. Wow.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
There were two instances on stage that I did the slightly wrong voice for the wrong character, and Kip happened to be in the audience on one of those shows, and he didn't notice, so that was good. It was in a kind of chaotic moment, which I was aware of, but no one else was, so that was a good cover, at least.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
I think the process of finding it in the body with the voice and the physicality really helped because when I come to perform them, you know, the Basil, for instance, is very, the tone of his voice or the The temper of his voice, perhaps, is quite brittle.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Basil Horwood, yeah. He's the artist. So he sort of sits quite on the gum ridge, just behind the teeth. And there's something centralized, I guess. Like, it's very focused down and right. It's hard to explain, actually, now that I'm thinking about it. And there's quite an obvious clue for Lord Henry where... the narrator says, said Lord Henry languidly.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
So there's quite an expansive quality to Lord Henry and There's something that's very somewhat like molasses, like he's very juicy. And also something about aristocratic British men who are able to hold court and speak widely on subjects. Lord Henry has quite a deep voice, but they actually have quite a range of pitch in their voices.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And if you listen to Stephen Fry, he's talking up right at the top level of his pitch and then right down at the bottom in the same sentence. And it really holds your attention. And that was something we really wanted to find for Lord Henry.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
It absolutely was. It was such a strange thing to have as a reference, like a real body reference, really, from my childhood of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, which, weirdly enough, I think Miriam Margulies...
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
read one of the characters or one of the poems and when I met her I didn't realize this until I'd until I was thinking about the Roald Dahl's uh element of it all and went back I was like oh man I should have told her that she was such an inspiration to me as a kid through her voice through the the ability like how her storytelling and characters really spoke to me when I was a kid
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, it's really, it's really strange. It's really strange because, well... What it does, particularly because I can't see myself ever, really. There's only once that I can see myself, which is the character of Alan Campbell. But otherwise I just have to listen to the audio recording aspect of it because I'm either back of stage or I'm in front of the screen or I'm behind the screen.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
I can't interact with it in that way. It really forces you to listen to what... the person is saying, what I'm saying, and forces you to be really imaginative, really engage with your imagination and how that makes you feel and what words are springing out to you tonight and what parts of the tone or how it's been delivered are springing out.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And maybe that's come from listening to audiobooks when I was a kid a lot and having that imagination sustained in that way.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, they'll just keep going. They're the worst kind of actors that I'm working with.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
They don't wait for me at all. They'll just barrel on. And if I don't keep up, it's my fault. Yeah, I mean, the hardest one of that is the Lord Henry. sequence in the dinner party scene where there's seven... And you're playing all those seven other guests. Yeah. How many is it? Dorian, two, three, four, five, six, I think. Yeah, I'm all of the... Yeah, it's all me.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
You're playing all the other guests, yes. But, you know, like, I don't think of them as me at all. I think of them as... The characters. I mean, I can only see a kind of a side version of them as well because the screen is obviously not three-dimensional.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
But weirdly enough, because it's six different people and, you know, each of those was shot individually and then comped together and, you know, there's the kind of magic of that. They're all doing different things at different times and I've... You know, the more you look at the visual... the more you can find something new.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
There's something that I didn't realize or I'd forgotten that I'd done as the Duchess that is quite nice to play off of against and to be like, oh, she's thinking that there. That's funny. Which is, you know, I can't do anything with that verbally, but I can use it to act opposite and to create something new for Lord Henry's performance.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, I mean, it is a lot of fun to do. And the narrator really is, in a sense, funny. Oscar Wilde. I'm not playing him as a character, but there is his energy and his wit is definitely infused naturally into that role because it is the character based on the prose of the book. Kip's turned a Victorian novel into a a play and a Victorian novel that wasn't meant to be read out loud.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
It wasn't like a Dickens or anything like that. It was meant to be read and in episodic form in a way. So it's somewhat difficult to turn that into dialogue as well as into something that is accessible to an audience now. And part of creating that has been to keep the wit that Oscar Wilde has inherently in that text.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
I think because I, you know, personally, I don't have any experience, you know, by association or proximity with wealth at that level. But I also, I guess I didn't, I didn't understand the show so much. And I didn't, I didn't at that time want to be a secondary kind of handbag character to the men in the show who were going to be
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
I think billions had just come out and I was like, oh yeah, I can see that. It's straight white men in business and there's no room for me there. So I don't think I'll have a very interesting through line and maybe I don't think I'm going to get this role anyway. I don't want to audition.
Fresh Air
Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And my friend, I was auditioning for something else and already had hair and makeup on, which is such an effort when you're doing self-tapes. I don't know. Other people might not think it is, but I find it a real effort doing a self-tape in the first place. But I was doing a self-tape for something else. And so my friend did just read the lines. Just have fun. Let's just try and do it.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
I don't know. I mean, there probably was a level of insouciance or attitude about not feeling right for this and like, you know, without using it as a succession word, F you for making me audition for this when I, you know, I'm not right for this. Like that's a bit shiv to be honest.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Are there similarities? Yeah. Yeah, there are similarities. I mean, very different in terms of the specificity required for Dorian and the fluidity allowed in succession. But something about the proximity of cameras and the kind of subtextual or subconscious awareness of them as a character is in both Succession and Dorian has been really useful to have experienced that in Succession.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
It was never like they are definitely a character and we're going to dramaturgically make them feel like that. But just the presence of, you know, like Gregor, one of the camera operators, at one point he was on the other side of the couch. I was doing the scene. He's behind my back on the other side of the couch. I look over. Yep, he's still behind me on the other side of the couch.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And within three seconds, I turn and throw another line back over my shoulder and he's right behind me. He has crossed the couch somehow. He's like leapt over it with a camera in hand. And that kind of agility from the camera operators, both in Dorian and Succession, is very similar.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Yeah, in some sense, yeah. We would do a director's rehearsal and we would know the approximate areas that we would need to be in. And then the camera operators with direction from...
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
The cinematographer and the director would be telling them, you know, be in this, okay, double down on that line, keep going, or, you know, do a crash zoom to here or there, like being in the right areas and the right spots. We would tend to light the room for the scene, or light one side and then the other side, so there was no, like...