The movie character Sarah Snook always wanted to be: “I thought he was very cool”
Sarah Snook is, like many of her Emmy-winning peers, still coming to terms with the countless labels assigned to her as one of the industry’s most defining current stars.
Mostly, this comes from the fact that she views one of her most career-defining roles as the antithesis of everything she is as a person. In Succession, Shiv Roy is a cool, smooth style icon with bags of assertiveness. And in Snook’s eyes, she’s the opposite of how she is in real life.
As she previously reflected to Harper’s Bazaar, “It’s so wild, and very amusing to me because I am not a style icon at all.”
She went on, “I have had a few instances where people have recognised me from the show and gone, ‘Oh, no it couldn’t be’, because I’ve not lived up to the expectation! Really, I’m nothing like Shiv.”
Having less confidence than Roy also means that Snook sometimes suffers from imposter syndrome, which, as most of us know, often crops up at the most interesting of times. Once, Snook experienced it while reflecting on the show’s 23 Emmy nominations, and how the major milestone occurred during the pandemic, which strangely helped in the sense that it made it feel more lighthearted than it actually was.
In the same interview, she also said how the storytelling element was the main driving force behind her craft. And that, when it comes to gauging whether an opportunity will actually be worthwhile or not, it often comes down to whether she has a feeling that she will be challenged. This has also ensured that she never feels boxed in by one genre or another.
When it comes to idols and heroes, Snook, like many in her position, learns a lot from other female figures. Taking guidance from people like Imogen Banks and Claudia Karvan, Snook is constantly conscious of the shitstorms that women have to navigate in the film industry.
However, on the topic of those she looks up to, these can range from those aforementioned to the more left-field options, like characters she discovered when she was younger that made her wish she could step into their shoes. One of which was the suave Disney thief himself, Aladdin. “I guess I always wanted to be Aladdin,” Snook mused to W Magazine. “I thought he was very cool.”
She went on, “He was a cartoon character, but I wanted to jump across buildings and have a genie as a best friend. The first film I saw at the cinema was Aladdin. I remember the genie at the end, he kind of pulls the curtain back at the end, he goes, ‘Made ya look’, because the film had otherwise ostensibly ended. It felt very meta. I was looking around, going, ‘Oh my god, has anyone else seen this?’”
It’s easy to imagine a lot of people looking at Snook’s Shiv Roy the way she once looked at Aladdin. Their impressive goddamn confidence, for one, especially when it comes to interacting with others, is something that a lot of people wish they had.
