Within the fairly, terraced city in nation Victoria the place the actress Sarah Snook lives there is just one pub open on this January vacation weekend, so that’s the place we meet. Snook’s first selection had gone darkish for the night time; she known as one other, and was proudly knowledgeable that they by no means shut, that if she turned up at three within the morning the proprietor himself would pour her a beer. However that pub is half-hour away, and on the most well liked summer time night time in current reminiscence, we resolve it’s good to be near residence. Nonetheless, Snook says to me with a sly smile, “I type of wish to strive that out someday.”
Snook, 37, who’s playful and up for something by nature, arrives on the pub in denims and a well-worn pair of Blundstones, the identical boots she wore at her yard marriage ceremony 4 years in the past. Snook and her husband, the actor Dave Lawson, reside close by on 35 acres of uninterrupted Australian bushland. We’re an hour or so north of Melbourne, the town of artists the place Snook has resided on and off for years, interrupted by stints in Sydney for drama college (she attended the Australian establishment NIDA, whose alumni embody Cate Blanchett and Baz Luhrmann) and Brooklyn, whereas starring because the Machiavellian Shiv Roy in Succession.
As a toddler she lived in Adelaide subsequent door to a nationwide park, which grew to become her personal wild playground. When she purchased her present residence among the many gum bushes, it was with a view to giving her future household, not but dreamed into existence, the identical type of childhood she as soon as loved, “using my bike and climbing bushes and doing all of the issues that ladies do.” In 2023, between wrapping Succession and starting rehearsals on The Image of Dorian Grey, which opened final yr in London’s West Finish to staggering acclaim, Snook had a child lady. The household will quickly decamp to New York for the manufacturing’s Broadway run. “We’ve taught her learn how to say, ‘New York Metropolis, bay-bee!’ ” Snook says, beaming with parental delight.
For one final Australian summer time hurrah, Snook hosted some associates and their kids for 3 exhausting and ebullient days: seven children crammed into bunk beds, bikes tearing by means of the yard, barbecue sausages for dinner. She is aware of her daughter most likely gained’t bear in mind any of it. However Snook will. When she left her home this night, she was greeted by the sight of a mob of kangaroos, grazing lazily in her yard. “My daughter can see that type of factor, and get excited,” she says. “Hopefully she by no means loses that pleasure.” Snook’s daughter, virtually two, can’t say “kangaroo” but, so the creatures who go to their residence each day are recognized by the entire household, in melodic parlance, as “ka-roos.” Snook says the phrase prefer it’s essentially the most lovely factor she’s ever heard.
On the first preview for Dorian Grey—within the first 5 minutes—Snook forgot her strains. Dorian Grey, conceived by former Sydney Theatre Firm inventive director Kip Williams, is an electrical adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Nineteenth-century novel, a narrative of the fear of 1 man’s self-importance, whose portrait bears the scars of his conceit. Right here it has been conceived as a one-woman monologue, with Snook taking part in not solely the preening protagonist however 25 extra characters over the course of two breathless hours.
Williams says the sheer bodily enterprise calls for “a superathlete.” Snook likens the efficiency to diving into a really chilly swimming pool. “When you get in, it’s tremendous,” she says. “However getting in is difficult.” There isn’t any intermission, no break, no understudy. Costume adjustments happen onstage, proper in entrance of the viewers. And rigged up round Snook is a gallery of screens, which function her ensemble and her mirror: utilizing each prerecorded footage and reside projections, the actress interacts with herself in several guises. This use of expertise literalizes the textual content. “There’s a component of me competing in opposition to the display screen,” says Snook, simply as Dorian does along with his portrait.
Although Snook didn’t star within the unique manufacturing (that might be the actress Eryn Jean Norvill), it was essentially the most profitable play in Sydney Theatre Firm historical past, and appears purpose-built for somebody like Snook, whose face can shift from anguish to willpower to quiet calculation, all in the identical breath. “She’s a chameleon,” Williams says. And the empathy she evokes—for a useless cad or a depressing mogul brat or, within the Oscar-nominated Australian animated movie Memoir of a Snail, an remoted hoarder—is singular. “There’s an actual authenticity to her,” says Memoir of a Snail writer-director Adam Elliot, who considered the largest names in Australian cinema for his lead voice—Nicole, Cate, Margot—earlier than zeroing in on Snook. “She’s capable of get you on her aspect, and go inside her mind.”
However at that first Dorian Grey preview in London, “I acquired actually shy,” Snook says, “and you may’t consider anything when you’re doing this present, in any other case the entire thing falls aside.” She requested for a line. “They stated it, and I went, Nope. ‘As soon as extra, line?’ They stated it once more, and I’m like, God, I don’t know the place I’m.” Seated within the viewers, vibrating with nervousness, was her husband. “He went white,” Snook says. “His abdomen turned. She’s acquired 60,000 extra phrases and she or he’s dried up already! We’re doomed!” Williams remembers gripping the costume designer’s hand. “The factor I’ll always remember is there was this look in her eyes,” he tells me. “This second of steely willpower, the place I noticed Sarah say to herself, No. I’m gonna stick this. And from then on she was word-perfect.”
Williams enrolled at NIDA simply after Snook graduated, the place “there was this buzz across the college concerning the redheaded actress who had simply left and the way she was extraordinary,” he recollects. When it got here time to take Dorian Grey to the West Finish, Snook was his first selection. The problem proved attractive. “Effectively, you may’t say no,” she remembers pondering. “If I noticed another person doing it, I’d’ve been like, Argh.” She went into rehearsals six months after giving start to her daughter, pumping throughout her lunch break as a result of she was nonetheless breastfeeding. “There was one thing that was releasing about going again to work,” she says. “It was exhausting, but additionally doable, as a result of I’ve acquired a beautiful husband, and we had a very good routine going.” Then Snook’s daughter went by means of a sleep regression and caught COVID. “After which I acquired COVID from her, the week earlier than opening the present.” When she thinks again to that interval, she shakes her head. To get by means of it she lower out alcohol—she had one glass of Champagne on opening night time—and give up caffeine to guard her voice. “I used to be jaw on the ground every day watching her steadiness being a brand new mother or father and creating 26 totally different characters,” Williams says. “It was superhuman.”
