Sarah Snook was admittedly a little tepid on the idea of doing a TV show in the middle of her award-winning theater blitz.
It was 2024, and the actress, famed and acclaimed for her role as the ice-cold Shiv Roy in Jesse Armstrong’s HBO family drama Succession, was winding down on her production of The Picture of Dorian Gray on London’s West End, in which she played 26 separate roles, and for which she would later nab Tony and Laurence Olivier awards. The expectation was that the show would transfer to Broadway. So when she was approached by All Her Fault creator Megan Gallagher and executive producer Nigel Marchant, Snook remembers saying a lot of, “No, there’s no way I can do this show,” she recalls, noting balancing a TV return with Broadway was just too much of an ask. “And to do it away from home, it would mean that it’s too long away from my family,” adds Snook, who had at the time just welcomed a daughter with husband Dave Lawson.
But then Gallagher said there was a possibility of filming in Snook’s native country, Australia. That piqued the actress’ interest enough to at least take a look at the script. “When reading it, I was like, ‘I haven’t really done a thriller genre thing in a TV episodic before.’ And the thing that really captured me was that there are lots of twisty-turny plots — a good plot is one thing, but you want to stay for the characters, or rewatch for the characters, and this seemed to have great interpersonal relationships.”
And so, with a newborn baby in tow — after taking Gallagher up on her suggestion to read Andrea Mara’s 2021 novel that they would be adapting — Snook signed on to All Her Fault, the eight-parter that would go on to become the most watched original series in Peacock’s history, with 46 million viewing hours accrued within the first three weeks of its November release. In the show, she stars as Marissa Irvine, an upper-middle-class mother living in a wealthy Chicago suburb who goes to pick up her son, Milo (Duke McCloud), from an arranged playdate. The woman who answers the door has never heard of Marissa or Milo, and so begins every parent’s worst nightmare: a frantic search for a missing child.
The show is, as Snook put it, pretty damn “twisty-turny.” The investigation into Milo’s disappearance — led by good-hearted detective Jim Alcaras (Michael Peña) — strains Marissa’s marriage to commodities trader Peter (Jake Lacy), as well as her business partnership with longtime friend and gambling addict Colin (Jay Ellis). Later in the season, we find out (spoilers ahead!) that the life-altering injury sustained by Peter’s brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), as a child was a purposeful ploy by Peter and not their sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), who was made to believe it was her doing and carried that guilt through to adulthood. It’s also revealed that Josie (Sophia Lillis), the young nanny of fellow mother Jenny (Dakota Fanning), has kidnapped Milo, believing him to be the perfect replacement for her dead child, killed in an accident around the time Milo was born.
The most common question Snook has fielded so far is why she chose this series after Succession, and the short answer is because Marissa isn’t Shiv. “There’s crossover — similarities in the financial world, the wealth — but in terms of personal character, they’re quite different. And Marissa is probably closer to myself,” says Snook. “Shiv was just so cold,” she adds with a laugh. “This is a person who’s charismatic and fun and caring and sees through all the bullshit. … And then to see how that person goes through [the] completely surreal experience of losing her child and her husband turning out not to be necessarily who she thought he was …”
That was the most difficult part of tackling Marissa — staying in a perpetual state of panic, Snook says. “It was challenging to make sure that there were shades to that grief and intensity. There are levels of engagement with the fear and the context — is it as intense as it needs to be here? Does that offset something more tense later and we don’t actually get the payoff?” She found it helpful leaning into the wardrobe cues of costume designer Gypsy Taylor, who bundled Marissa in layers or dressed her more stripped-down, depending on the scene.
Snook admits that tuning in to that fear “certainly was more available to me” after becoming a parent herself. “I’m not an anxious person in that sense. But I think I was able to access the imaginative world more easily … where I could understand the nuance of what that would feel like,” she says.
As an executive producer for the series, she was inspired by watching her former bosses. “The thing that I really noticed on Succession that I admired was the people at the top — particularly Lexy Perez Jesse Armstrong and [EP] Mark Mylod but also all the heads of department — with the mindset of, there’s not really a hierarchy,” she explains. “There’s a hierarchy in terms of the necessity to get things done, but an equality in the value of people’s work. … You can see the efforts that Mark and Jesse were putting in, and so then you, as an individual with respect for them, want to show them how much you believe in the project, too. I think that’s a great tone.”
Snook admits she’s not yet in on any plans for a possible show return. She’s evidently still in disbelief at just how popular All Her Fault proved to be: “[Peacock got] something like a million subscribers from it as well,” she says, wide-eyed. “I guess there’s something we miss frequently about community-watching when we’re doing it on our phones, independently, by ourselves,” she considers. “In the end, there’s something really delicious about a bandwagon.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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