Sarah Snook on her multifaceted performance in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Sarah Snook set the record straight for us: Her last name is pronounced “Snuke” (like nuke), not “Snook” (as in book or took).

On Broadway this spring, she’s neither Snuke nor Snook, but 26 completely different people. The 37-year-old Australian is chameleonic in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” changing accents, wigs, and gender to tell the story of a man who makes a spiritual bargain to appear eternally young, while his portrait reflects the hideousness of his actions.  

The show has suspense, horror, humor, and also a lot of heart. “People don’t often credit Oscar Wilde with something heartfelt,” I said.

“Yeah, he has a lot of pathos,” Snook said. “I think there’s a lot of empathy for the human condition – I think, you know, seeing the soul as a real thing and as a part of your body, personality, spiritual makeup that one might need to protect and look after.”

It’s a performance for which Snook won an Olivier (the British theater award) during the show’s run in London’s West End.

Oscar Wilde published the story (his only novel) in 1890. Victorian critics called it “poisonous” and “morally depraved.” Now, almost a century-and-a-half later, the tale feels resonant. Snook said today is an interesting time to come to this story, “where we have such an image-based culture and ability to construct a visual image to sell to anyone online, on Instagram. And part of the reason of playing multiple different characters is about choosing which mask is the right mask, which is the public/private mask that we show of ourselves.”

After making her name known abroad, Snook is now beloved by American audiences as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, the cutthroat billionaire she played as the scion of a family empire on the TV series “Succession.” The saltiness of her Shiv garnered Snook legions of fans, and several awards.

But Snook initially didn’t want to audition for Shiv because, she says, she couldn’t relate to her being beautiful and wealthy. “Yeah, there was nothing in myself that I could see as, like, reflective or accessible in that character,” she said.

Like Dorian Gray, Shiv is an anti-hero, and Snook’s been drawn to those complicated characters for a long time: “I watched a ton of Disney films when I was a kid, and all I wanted to be was Ursula and Scar, all the villains, all the people who had seeming more complexity to why they were that in the first place.”

Snook discovered that complexity for herself during one of her first acting gigs back home in Adelaide: “I used to do fairy parties. It was such a good training ground, ’cause kids, man, they tell you if they’re not interested.”

Was she heckled? “Yeah. Like, ‘Fly! Lemme see you fly! Come on! Why can’t you fly? Show us!'”

Kip Williams, the director and adapter of “Dorian Gray,” arrived at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney the year that Snook had just left. “There was this word around school that there was this incredible red-headed actress, so my radar as a director was up for Sarah from the beginning,” he said.

Williams knew that he wanted to collaborate with Snook, and felt that a single actor could embody all the facets of Wilde’s legendary work. “Oscar Wilde talks about this notion that life is one grand act of theater, and that people are always in a form of performance where they are either revealing or concealing parts of themselves,” Williams said. “So, the form of this piece – one performer playing all of these 26 characters – is an expression of that idea.”

It is with technology that Williams illuminates humanity. He calls it “cine-theater” – combining live performance with cameras, large screens, and pre-recorded videos.

So, is it fair to call this a one-woman show? “I think it is definitely a one-person show,” Williams said, “but it is also, paradoxically, an ensemble piece. The camera team and the crew are kind of like her co-performers. They dance with her on stage – literally, one moment.”

A dance that feels intimately familiar to Snook: “The feeling of a camera really close to you and not having that disrupt your train of thought or your flow, I think that’s something that was really useful in ‘Succession,’ ’cause we kind of absorbed them as extra characters in the scene,” she said.

Snook has a few extra characters in her own life, too. She got married during the pandemic and has a young daughter. But as it turns out, Sarah Snook has not bitten off more than she can chew.

“So, this is your Broadway debut. Is the pressure off since you’ve already had such a successful run?” I asked.

Snook replied, “Actually, one thing that Kip said on the first day of rehearsals is, ‘You can only eat an elephant one spoonful at a time.’ ‘Yeah, sure. Okay. I’ll do it that way.'”

“So you think you’ve eaten the whole thing by now?”

“No, now I’ve gotta eat the Broadway part of the elephant!” Snook laughed.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Watch an extended interview with Sarah Snook 

To watch a trailer for “The Picture of Dorian Gray” click on the video player below:

       
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Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Lauren Barnello.