In the pretty, terraced town in country Victoria where the actress Sarah Snook lives there is only one pub open on this January holiday weekend, so that is where we meet. Snook’s first choice had gone dark for the night; she called another, and was proudly informed that they never close, that if she turned up at three in the morning the owner himself would pour her a beer. But that pub is 30 minutes away, and on the hottest summer night in recent memory, we decide it’s good to be close to home. Still, Snook says to me with a sly smile, “I kind of want to try that out sometime.”
Snook, 37, who is playful and up for anything by nature, arrives at the pub in jeans and a well-worn pair of Blundstones, the same boots she wore at her backyard wedding four years ago. Snook and her husband, the actor Dave Lawson, live nearby on 35 acres of uninterrupted Australian bushland. We’re an hour or so north of Melbourne, the city of artists where Snook has resided on and off for years, interrupted by stints in Sydney for drama school (she attended the Australian institution NIDA, whose alumni include Cate Blanchett and Baz Luhrmann) and Brooklyn, while starring as the Machiavellian Shiv Roy in Succession.
As a child she lived in Adelaide next door to a national park, which became her own wild playground. When she bought her current home among the gum trees, it was with a view to giving her future family, not yet dreamed into existence, the same kind of childhood she once enjoyed, “riding my bike and climbing trees and doing all the things that girls do.” In 2023, between wrapping Succession and beginning rehearsals on The Picture of Dorian Gray, which opened last year in London’s West End to staggering acclaim, Snook had a baby girl. The family will soon decamp to New York for the production’s Broadway run. “We’ve taught her how to say, ‘New York City, bay-bee!’ ” Snook says, beaming with parental delight.
For one last Australian summer hurrah, Snook hosted some friends and their children for three exhausting and ebullient days: seven kids crammed into bunk beds, bikes tearing through the backyard, barbecue sausages for dinner. She knows her daughter probably won’t remember any of it. But Snook will. When she left her house this evening, she was greeted by the sight of a mob of kangaroos, grazing lazily in her backyard. “My daughter can see that kind of thing, and get excited,” she says. “Hopefully she never loses that excitement.” Snook’s daughter, almost two, can’t say “kangaroo” yet, so the creatures who visit their home every day are known by the whole family, in melodic parlance, as “ka-roos.” Snook says the word like it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard.
At the first preview for Dorian Gray—in the first five minutes—Snook forgot her lines. Dorian Gray, conceived by former Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams, is an electric adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 19th-century novel, a story of the terror of one man’s vanity, whose portrait bears the scars of his conceit. Here it has been conceived as a one-woman monologue, with Snook playing not only the preening protagonist but 25 additional characters over the course of two breathless hours.
Williams says the sheer physical undertaking demands “a superathlete.” Snook likens the performance to diving into a very cold swimming pool. “Once you get in, it’s fine,” she says. “But getting in is hard.” There is no intermission, no break, no understudy. Costume changes take place onstage, right in front of the audience. And rigged up around Snook is a gallery of screens, which serve as her ensemble and her mirror: using both prerecorded footage and live projections, the actress interacts with herself in different guises. This use of technology literalizes the text. “There’s an element of me competing against the screen,” says Snook, just as Dorian does with his portrait.
Though Snook did not star in the original production (that would be the actress Eryn Jean Norvill), it was the most successful play in Sydney Theatre Company history, and seems purpose-built for someone like Snook, whose face can shift from anguish to determination to quiet calculation, all in the same breath. “She’s a chameleon,” Williams says. And the empathy she inspires—for a vain cad or a miserable mogul brat or, in the Oscar-nominated Australian animated film Memoir of a Snail, an isolated hoarder—is singular. “There’s a real authenticity to her,” says Memoir of a Snail writer-director Adam Elliot, who thought of the biggest names in Australian cinema for his lead voice—Nicole, Cate, Margot—before zeroing in on Snook. “She’s able to get you on her side, and go inside her brain.”
But at that first Dorian Gray preview in London, “I got really shy,” Snook says, “and you can’t think of anything else while you’re doing this show, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.” She asked for a line. “They said it, and I went, Nope. ‘Once more, line?’ They said it again, and I’m like, God, I don’t know where I am.” Seated in the audience, vibrating with anxiety, was her husband. “He went white,” Snook says. “His stomach turned. She’s got 60,000 more words and she’s dried up already! We’re doomed!” Williams remembers gripping the costume designer’s hand. “The thing I will never forget is there was this look in her eyes,” he tells me. “This moment of steely determination, where I saw Sarah say to herself, No. I’m gonna stick this. And from then on she was word-perfect.”
Williams enrolled at NIDA just after Snook graduated, where “there was this buzz around the school about the redheaded actress who had just left and how she was extraordinary,” he recalls. When it came time to take Dorian Gray to the West End, Snook was his first choice. The challenge proved enticing. “Well, you can’t say no,” she remembers thinking. “If I saw someone else doing it, I would’ve been like, Argh.” She went into rehearsals six months after giving birth to her daughter, pumping during her lunch break because she was still breastfeeding. “There was something that was freeing about going back to work,” she says. “It was hard, but also doable, because I’ve got a wonderful husband, and we had a good routine going.” Then Snook’s daughter went through a sleep regression and caught COVID. “And then I got COVID from her, the week before opening the show.” When she thinks back to that period, she shakes her head. To get through it she cut out alcohol—she had one glass of Champagne on opening night—and quit caffeine to protect her voice. “I was jaw on the floor each day watching her balance being a new parent and creating 26 different characters,” Williams says. “It was superhuman.”
