Sarah Snook is on the crest of a wave, having just collected her second Golden Globe award for her role of Shiv in Succession, but the Australian star reveals that, as an actress starting out, she was treated very badly by both a casting agent and a producer.
Snook told The Times newspaper that, on one of her very first films, she was told by a casting agent that they didn’t want her “because you’re a nobody,” but the director and writer were pushing for her. She was told: “What we’ll do is change all of you so that you’re marketable: we’ll whiten your teeth, darken your hair, we’ll give you a personal trainer so you can lose weight and look the part.”
On the same project, Snook revealed that she ate a small piece of cake, and a producer told her off in front of cast and crew, while a costume designer told her to keep eating. “And all the while I am dying inside.”
Snook played Shiv Roy, Logan Roy’s complex daughter, over four seasons of Succession and she told the newspaper that she wept when the finale aired in May 2023.
“I was three or four weeks postpartum, the hormones were raging. But it was just the chrysalis of knowing that’s the end of this really important, special part of my life.”
Her next role promises to be equally challenging, taking on all 26 parts in a production of The Portrait of Dorian Gray on London’s West End stage.