INTO THE WILD

Post-Succession, Sarah Snook embarked on twin adventures: motherhood and a kaleidoscopic stage challenge in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

- Hannah-Rose Yee

In the pretty, terraced town in country Victoria where the actress Sarah Snook lives there is only one pub open on this January holiday weekend, so that is where we meet. Snook's first choice had gone dark for the night; she called another, and was proudly informed that they never close, that if she turned up at three in the morning the owner himself would pour her a beer. But that pub is 30 minutes away, and on the hottest summer night in recent memory, we decide it's good to be close to home. Still, Snook says to me with a sly smile, "I kind of want to try that out sometime."

Snook, 37, who is playful and up for anything by nature, arrives at the pub in jeans and a well-worn pair of Blundstones, the same boots she wore at her backyard wedding four years ago. Snook and her husband, the actor Dave Lawson, live nearby on 35 acres of uninterrupted Australian bushland. We're an hour or so north of Melbourne, the city of artists where Snook has resided on and off for years, interrupted by stints in Sydney for drama school (she attended the Australian institution NIDA, whose alumni include Cate Blanchett and Baz Luhrmann) and Brooklyn, while starring as the Machiavellian Shiv Roy in Succession.

As a child she lived in Adelaide next door to a national park, which became her own wild playground. When she bought her current home among the gum trees, it was with a view to giving her future family, not yet dreamed into existence, the same kind of childhood she once enjoyed, "riding my bike and climbing trees and doing all the things that girls do." In 2023, between wrapping Succession and beginning rehearsals on The Picture of Dorian Gray, which opened last year in London's West End to staggering acclaim, Snook had a baby girl. The family will soon decamp to New York for the production's Broadway run.

"We've taught her how to say, 'New York City, bay-bee!"" Snook says, beaming with parental delight.