Extended Interview: Sarah Snook on "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

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94% of patients pay $0 out of pocket. Find your personal dietitian at usenourish.com. That's usenourish.com. This is Jane Pauley. You may know Sarah Snook from her award-winning role on the hit show Succession.

Well, now she's on Broadway playing not one, but 26 characters. Faith Salie is talking with Sarah Snook. Some people presume they might know me and then think that we went to school together or something. And I go, or there's, oh, I've seen you around. And like, like, do we know each other? And I say, oh, maybe I've caught this train a bit. So maybe on there or like, ah, I've been in the area. I live in the area. You play the humble card.

Yeah. What am I going to say? Like, let me just pull out my resume.

What am I going to do? If they go as far as, so what do you do? I go, oh, I'm in entertainment or I work as an actress. And then if the conversation has been, I've seen you before.

Are you, are you around here or do I recognize you from the coffee shop? Then they go, cool. So what are you doing now? And then it's, yeah. You're like, now I'm playing 26 characters in two hours. Yeah.

So you're back in this role that you haven't played for eight months. Yeah. Does it live in your body? Is it like muscle memory? It is. And then shockingly isn't. If I overthink something in the rehearsal rooms, I had noticed if I, if I think too much about something, then I lose the thread and it's gone. But if I just let, let it flow and let it just come out, then it's there, which is a strange experience.

If I overthink it, it's gone. Do you think that's kind of a metaphor for an acting experience? Probably. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Trying too hard often gets in the way.

So I mean, this particular job though, you do have to try pretty hard because you have to keep a lot of balls up in the air and plates spinning at the same time. And Kip, when we first met about this project on Zoom, he described it as a very pat head, rubbed tummy kind of experience, which is pretty right. And it's also like pat head, rubbed tummy, and then swap hands and do the opposite. Yeah. With a cigarette in it.

With a cigarette in your head. And sideburns. Yep. Yep.

And a wig and then take it off and then do it again. When Kip first talked to you about this role, what did he say? He said a lot. He's a very intelligent man and has a lot of great insights into the book. I think it's very close to his heart talking about themes and story and character and life and philosophy. He also did say it's a monumental challenge, but that's part of the deliciousness of doing the role, I think. The reward of doing this is the challenge. Did he have to persuade you? Not really.

And I think probably had I seen the show before we'd spoken, I would have maybe thought twice about doing it because I had had a baby, you know, at seven months postpartum, I started rehearsals for it and started performance for West End at nine months to when she was just over a year. That was intense. It's really intense. And that's really intense. And that's a really strange time to decide to do a monumental challenge like this. But I think the ignorance is bliss on both sides of what parenting is and what taking on this role is.

And then you're in it, so you can't go backwards and you can't go, well, I'm going to stop. You have to just rise to the challenge. I think that was the best outcome, though perhaps I may have been more scared if I'd known more about both before and saying yes. I don't usually like asking this question because I feel like it's only asked to women. But I read an interview where you talked about, this was years ago, turning to your female mentor saying, when's the right time to have kids? Yeah, yeah. And lo and behold, you're a mother and doing a one person show on Broadway.

So how's that all working out? Well, I think the answer to that is there's never a right time. There's just the time that you do and you make it the right time for whatever your family circumstances at that moment. And there's a real synthesizing of what is important. I think with I have found at least with parenthood and with motherhood specifically is you. It's very it's very empowering in a lot of ways. And you kind of get a balance of what is worthwhile, what are your priorities, what you need to do to protect your health, your baby's health, your mental health, which is maybe a better way to go into a play like this as well. Like it was very specific about going, all right, no alcohol, no coffee, good nutrition, very like, like an athlete would do for a normal kind of athletic undertaking, which like you just don't think about necessarily for an actor because you don't necessarily.

Well, it is not as easy to go. It's it's an athletic thing to do this show particularly. And also like your body is your instrument. And so looking after it is important.

And maybe coming to that and by way of family, is has been nice to experience. So you play 26 characters. Yeah. How do you keep them all straight physically and emotionally in terms of the delineation between the characters?

I mean, a lot of it is as vocal differences. And so in the warm up that I do, I will warm up each character and warm up in that kind of in that character physically and vocally. And you do that before every show? Yeah.

How long does that take? It's like a half hour warm up, you know, some physical breath work, dropping in a bit of meditation, bit of then, yeah, vocal stuff, physical stuff. In London, I started having to do well, I found it useful to start doing like star jumps. Do you call them star jumps here? Jumping jacks? Yeah, jumping jacks. Jumping jacks. Well, I'm gonna start calling them star jumps. Star jumps.

Yeah, we don't. Yeah, jumping jacks. Huh? Yeah, we call them star jumps.

Cute. When you are on stage, you get adrenaline and you're having to talk all the time. And with adrenaline, I think you lose a third of your lung capacity. And so I was trying desperately to increase my lung capacity, as well as being able to still speak and articulate and do the character voice and all that at the same time. So I found that yeah, doing star jumps or jumping jacks would help that. How does your body feel after?

Great. Really strangely, there's a, it's like coming off and having done a lot of exercise, and you get this really strong endorphin rush, and then a really restorative breath out and calm for a moment. And then, yeah, it's exhausting. But there's something restorative about it. So what is the story of the Picture of Dorian Gray? The Picture of Dorian Gray is about Dorian, who is a beautiful young man. When we first meet him at the beginning of the play, Basil Hallward is an artist who wants to paint him, paints this gorgeous picture of him. And in the painting of him, Dorian realizes that Dorian realizes that there is going to be a time in the future where he won't look like this painting, where the painting will never age, and he will always continue to age, get older, he says, become old, dreadful and horrible, which to a young person, I think, is what they expect the experience of aging may be.

It's not true. And so in that moment, he sort of makes this curse, wish, prayer, that the picture is to grow old instead. But then without having any checks and balances on what his moral code or consequences or anything that could harm his image or the people's belief in how beautiful and good he is, his soul degrades because he can get away with anything. He can do anything, experience anything.

It's like having the most debaucherous, riotous, bacchanalian party with no hangover. And how tempting that would be, but then how far but then how far would you allow your soul and moral code to stretch and degrade? And so he hides this picture in the attic and his own mental health begins to spiral, seeing how bad he really is and comes to the question of, am I a good person or am I evil? Have I done too many bad things in my life to be unsavable?

Am I too far gone? And then he makes the decision of what he believes is true or not in that moment. Spoiler alert. Spoiler.

I mean, if you haven't read the 1800 novel, then I can't help you. Had you read it before? I hadn't read it before doing this. No. You hadn't?

No, I missed that at high school and all of that. What was your experience reading the novella knowing I'm going to buy all these people? Oh, really fun. Really fun. It's great going like, Oh, Mrs.

Leaf. Okay. I see you. What about like Lord Henry and the Duchess?

Okay. Yeah, really fun. Sibyl Vane. And it's so gothic. Like he's such a masterful writer at the, by the end, it's really turning the page and getting the chills and tingles of the slow reveal of gothic horror.

It's great. How does this thing that Dorian wrestles with so explicitly that society thinks he's one thing and he's something else. How does that resonate with you? I've always found that something interesting to explore. And for me, the attempt to lessen the gap between that has been really important to be as much as myself, as I am in private, as I am publicly, but still keeping my life private, I suppose. Not in the over sharing, I guess, of private details or things like that. But being as true and honest a version of myself in public as I am in private, which sometimes backfires.

Where like, I don't know, you go down to the shops in your trackies and your UGG boots, you're like, Oh, cool. Well, this is my private self. I don't really want to be photographed right now. There it is, I guess. But funnily enough, people tend to recognize me less when I am myself. And maybe appreciate you more.

She looks like, oh, she looks really bad. Hey, can I? Probably not. It's okay. This is called cine theater. Yeah.

Yeah. How does it work? Well, there's a lot of technology that has to work in tandem with me to make it work.

We have four cameras, five camera operators, six screens. They all move around at certain times with the music, with my vocal cues. They at times I'm talking to myself on stage live whilst there is a prerecorded version of myself that I filmed in 2023, at the end of 2023. So it's like really strange to work with somebody from like, it's in the past. It's me in the past.

Yeah. On stage, talking opposite myself. Sometimes I can see myself in that.

Sometimes it looks like I can, but I can't. So I have to work inside the tiny little cues that are being given. It's a monumental feat of coordination and teamwork to get the thing to work seamlessly. And so many moments where we've created a, where Kip has created this magic trick of cutting away here so you think that I'm on screen live, but actually that part is prerecorded and the next part is live. I think there's only two people I know that have seen this particular shot that worked. It works every time, but to understand what the magic is, there was one person in the audience in London that I, it's, I walk across the stage and open the door. And if you find it, you will know that there's a little trick going on there.

Cause I also come through the door at the same time and which one is live, we don't know. And I run down stage in London and I see three rows back this man sitting in the third row going to the point where I really wanted to stop and go, you got it. I saw it. You got it. Well done, man. One of the only few. You got it. Yeah.

His face was so glorious. Like a little, little kid. Yeah.

He really got, got caught. This is Broadway. There might be somebody in the audience who's like, yeah.

There might be. Yeah. Well, I hear Broadway audiences are so much more interactive. And when I've been to a show here, there's more audience participation. I guess I gotta be prepared for that. And I do talk directly to the audience and invite that in, I guess.

Ooh, I got to really prepare for that. Do you call the people who are with you on camera, are they camera people? They almost feel like they're cast. Yeah. They're cast and camera, camera cast. So with your camera cast, there's real choreography. Yeah. Yeah. It's not just blocking. You're like doing pivot steps.

It looked like ballroom dancing when I saw you. That's a good way. Yeah, true. That's, and certainly in the last chapter, in chapter 20, we really have to work as a kind of a hive, like a swarm that moves, school of fish that move together. And there are really specific moments that Kip has designed to have the cameras cut on and to look at the right camera at that right moment, and also make it feel spontaneous and free. And also credit to both Oscar, Oscar's source material, as well as Kip's adaptation, is that I do find new things. It's really exciting to go like, Oh my God, I've never thought of it that way before. If you just put the emphasis on that word or start that track of thought a little earlier, then something else comes out.

Oh, that's cool. Because so much of it is really specific, has to be, you know, to the beat with the cues and the camera movements. But then sometimes there's a real space that opens up inside that. It's really interesting. Would you say that's the heart of live theater?

Yeah. I mean, you want spontaneity and you want, you want things to go wrong as well. You want things to sort of surprise you. And in London, we did have things happen that were, had to call a show stop, which is, which is, you know, just natural with technology.

You're working with things that you can't, you want to be able to control everything, but naturally things maybe overheat or they change, or like some sort of algorithm didn't work. And so sometimes there's a show stop called. And there's something that it's really, there's a frisson of excitement then because it's live. The whole thing is live. That is a, the person calling the show is live editing a two hour feature film every night. Yeah. And, and working with the rhythms of my performance, which are similar, but not exactly the same, but yeah, every night edited. Did the show ever stop because you made a mistake?

In the first performance, first preview, don't want to curse myself. Is there any wood around here? Yes. Yeah.

Okay. First performance, first preview, I dried. I didn't remember my line. Couldn't remember it.

It's like, it's gone. What'd you do? Had to ask for a line because obviously, you know, there's someone operating the camera, so they're quite close to me. So I didn't have to like go off stage and say line. I could say line. Poor Rose repeated the line.

I went, nope, don't have it. Can't do it again. So she did it again. And then you kind of go, well, my poor husband in the, in the audience, he was like, I'm almost fainting. I'm going to take off. I'm going to jump around. I'm like overheating. She's got a 60,000 words to do.

And she can't remember the first seven. But, but, you know, you kind of, you just have to narrow your focus and get on with the task and keep going and trust that it's there and not think about it too much. We'll have more from our Sunday morning extended interview after this break.

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Hiring Indeed is all you need. Dorian's fate is dictated in part by his flawless beauty. I've heard you talk about how profoundly unattractive you thought you were when you were a teenager. Yeah. Oh, but I feel like everyone goes through that in a way. I mean, I don't know, but I don't think that's a unique experience for a young woman to go through their teens, twenties, going like, I know that there are pretty people in the world and I'm not one of them. And it's just not really understanding or being, and maybe it's different now.

Maybe because like Instagram, there is a democratizing of what is beauty on Instagram. I think, you know, you see more body diversity, you see more gender diversity, you see like diversity across everything and you can then pick and choose. Oh, that's, that feels more like me. You know, the thing of, you can't see it. If you can't see it, you can't be it. It wasn't an experience of my life in my teens and twenties to be like, I'm hot.

Does anyone? I don't know. I didn't feel that. You talked about a casting director who said you had to change everything about yourself.

Yeah. I mean, producer, they didn't go like, we don't think this is, we don't approve of this. It was, we think the character needs to be more like this. I feel like those, there's a different way to have that conversation now, probably. I would hope it's a different way to have that conversation now. Moving from Dorian's eternal youth to your youth. Did you always want to be an actor?

Yeah, I think so. I don't think I really knew it was like a job. I didn't, I didn't go like, I want to, like, it was, it was like, I, I love doing plays. I love doing characters. I love doing this. I want to keep doing that. And getting to a point where I had a great drama teacher at high school who told me to audition for NIDA and said, you know, it'll, you probably won't get in because you're just straight out of high school, but use it as a drama class and a really great acting experience.

And NIDA is the premiere? Yeah, it's like the Juilliard of Australia. And that was great. It was really good to have encouraging people around me who could see it as a potential career, but really more so were fostering an interest in a young person. And I think that was great to experience.

It wasn't the pressure of never, I never felt the pressure of like becoming an actress. I wanted to do it. And I wanted to like, challenge myself by doing it. And I had friends who did it as a child actor or through high school. And so I always like, wanted to be a part of it, but never really thought of it as like a job, job, I guess. Just like an expression of one's passion, I suppose.

And you may have come by it genetically, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My grandmother was an actress in the 20s in London. Yeah, which is great. To be doing this show in London was so special.

Yeah. So special. In a theater that she definitely would have gone to see shows in. And you thought of her when you were trotting the boards. Yeah, I never got to meet her. So I thought of her a lot there. It was really a wonderful experience. Do you miss Succession?

I drove past some of the film trucks on the way here. I was like, oh, yeah, I miss like the team and the community and the, the routine and the process of discovering a new script and doing some scenes and like turning off for work and having fun with your friends and, you know, really being challenged and rewarded in a, in a quick turnaround. So I miss it in that sense.

Yeah, for sure. And your buddy, Kieran Culkin is just going to be just down the street for a while. And he's doing a show.

Oh, I'm so excited. How are you going to see each other's shows? Well, We're Dark on Mondays and He's Dark on Sundays. Perfect. So I could see it every Monday if I wanted. And heckle him.

And heckle him. Oh, man. Have you seen his film?

I haven't. It's so good. He's so good. You were pretty famous for improvising in Succession. Yeah. And there's no, well, he, he did more than I did. He was much, he's much more clever than I am at that.

Is there any room for improvisation in Dorian? Oh, my God. No, I will say this.

Kieran is like one of the best actors I know. And he would say this as well. I think he would struggle to do this job because you have to hit your mark within a millimetre and he would rip up marks on Succession.

He'd be taking them up and throwing them away. Yeah. He, he would struggle with this, the, the having to, having to stay on the, on the script, no deviation, on the mark. Yeah. The way that you all film Succession seems to have primed you to do a two hour play.

In a really roundabout way. In a, yeah, because the, the freedom and the spontaneity allowed in Succession, though it was also like, you need to skip, stick to the script and you can improv a bit, but it's, it's around this, it's around here. And, and also to be honest, the scripts are so tightly written on Succession that any improv, there was, you could see the spaces that it was written for improv. And, and for the most part, like Kieran could do it brilliantly.

I could do it a little bit, but for the most part, I'd want to stick to the script anyway, because it was so much better than anything I could come up with. Were you surprised at how popular Succession was? Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. The first, after the first season when we went to the Emmys for the first time, it was really like, whoa, a lot of people I respect, like the show that I've just done. That's interesting. That's really exciting and really special. Why do you think it resonated with so many people who aren't billionaires?

Well, that's the lesson really in the end, isn't it? That we're all the same. We're all like, everyone's got a sibling or a parent that they are about. I met this guy, Tom, who owns a kind of a hippie shop. And when I first met him, he was like, Logan, that's my dad. I was like, really? Did you give him a hug? I was like, oh no, man.

He goes, we didn't grow up with money, we didn't grow up with money, but I know that guy. I know that feeling. And yeah, which is, you know, and on the other side of that, the expression of that is to try and be the opposite and be as compassionate and loving to your family. And, you know, but seeing something familiar, I think people, and Succession dealt with those things in humour, with difficult moments in undercutting and using humour to disarm or to weaponize. And I think people enjoy that aspect of it. Do you see similarities between Shiv and Dorian Gray?

Not directly, not in a linear sense. I haven't used her, I suppose, as a reference, but in the entitlement, in the sort of wealth, I suppose, that Dorian is allowed access to and exposed to. It seems like they're trying to forge their identities in contrast to what's been bestowed on them, right?

Like, Shiv is born into billions, Dorian's born into beauty. And it's like, who am I really? Like, does this define me? I don't know. That's a really good point.

That's a really, yeah, definitely. I wonder whether there's something in that in terms of my interest in those characters of going, what defines me as Sarah? And the pursuit of that and the constant reckoning or recalibration or, yeah, what is, who am I as a person? What does define you, do you think? You're so good at being other people. What defines you?

I don't know. I think that's the thing that is the, is a constant evolution and the constant conversation with oneself to find that. Yeah. And I think that's an interesting conversation to keep having with oneself.

Yeah. I feel like every interview I read about you, there's some point where the writer says something to the effect of Sarah Snook seems not to know who she is. As in seems not to, not like you're having an existential crisis, but not like you have settled into or embraced a list or status.

Oh no. Well, and here's the point of the interview. Yeah, nah, I don't, I don't, that's not a, that's not a, I don't feel that's a part of my identity or a definition I would use for myself. Do you think that's part of the tall poppy ness of being Australian? I'm sure there's a part of like cultural ingrained, but I think, I guess I don't see it as a equal and opposite in it going like, because I don't think of myself as a list of celebrity, then I must think of myself as D-lister or, you know, like it's not, it's not a equivalent equal and opposite sort of comparison.

I just don't pull it into my identity. What are you dreaming of? I have to do a film next.

I guess I see myself more as a character actress, but I'd like to do a character in a film that is interesting. I got it in my head. It's there somewhere. Yeah. What's more challenging than this? Well, there's always something, something new to be challenged by and maybe it's the simplicity of something. Maybe it's the not thinking ability is going to work in that and finding a way to stop the, you know, the quiet voices in your head, the doubtful voices, whatever it is. There's challenges everywhere. You know, I also use the kind of, what will I regret not doing?

Or if taking this job, what are the reasons to take it? So I know later, if it doesn't work out, then I'm not going to go, okay, well, I know why I did that. And that's okay. season of On Fire, the only official Survivor podcast. If you're a Survivor super fan, you won't want to miss this deep dive into every episode where we break down how we designed the game, the biggest moves, your burning questions. It's the only podcast that gives you inside access to Survivor that nobody else can.

Listen to On Fire, the official Survivor podcast with me, Jeff Kropes, every Wednesday after the show, wherever you get your podcasts. What's up Hoop fans? I'm Ashley Nicole Moss, and I'm bringing you Triple Threat, your weekly courtside pass to the most interesting moments and conversations in the NBA. From clutch performances to the stories shaping the game on and off the court, Triple Threat has you covered with it all. Culture, drama, and social media buzz, we're locked in just like you're locked in. Watch weekly on CBS Sports Network at 1 p.m. Eastern or on the CBS Sports YouTube channel as we break it all down fast and fresh. This is Triple Threat, where basketball meets culture.