People love Shiv. “You lucky bitch,” said my friend when I mentioned I was going to New York to interview Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv in the hit TV series Succession. What’s so lovable about a character described (by one of her creators) as “a flawed, monstrous nightmare”? It’s her strawberry-blonde hair, her razor-sharp retorts, her sidelong looks, her stealth-wealth wardrobe, her strangely expressive face and manipulative ways. She’s “Shiv fucking Roy” and she embodies one of the delightfully unpredictable elements that run through the heart of Succession: the fact that, despite being a woman, she doesn’t have a heart of gold.
“I actually think Shiv is an incredibly difficult part to play. In the wrong hands she could seem like a stone-cold bitch,” says co-executive producer Georgia Pritchett, also one of the show’s team of writers. “But Sarah’s performance is so layered – she manages to bring such vulnerability to the part, it makes the character and her relationships much richer and more interesting.”
And here is Sarah Snook, sitting in a low-key cafe eating banana bread, cheery and open, wearing a T-shirt and black trousers, her hair shoved into a baseball cap, her feet in a pair of ancient Blundstones which, she shows me, have a hole
