When Sarah Snook finished up her run of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” on the West End, she was looking forward to a restful holiday, admitting she was “pretty burnt out” from playing 26 characters in the one woman show. But when she took a meeting with Megan Gallagher and Nigel Marchant surrounding a TV adaptation of the suburban thriller series “All Her Fault,” she knew she had to jump on the opportunity, pulling her back into the TV world in her first post-“Succession” role.
“They told me the premise, they told me the plot, and they told me the twist … [and] it was one of those things, like, ‘Oh, man, yeah, I guess I’m not resting now,’” Snook told TheWrap. “There’s no way I can say no to this. This is too delicious.”
Adapted from Andrea Mara’s book of the same name, the Peacock series follows Snook’s Marissa Irvine after she arrives to pick up her son up from a playdate only to realize he’s nowhere to be found. What follows is a high-stakes kidnapping saga that forces Marissa to look critically at those she considers family.
With the kidnapping believed to be tied to the potential of a ransom given Marissa’s job in finance, “All Her Fault” brought Snook back into “Succession’s” world of wealthy elites — though she admitted Marissa is nowhere near the amount of wealth possessed by Shiv — but this time, Snook was able to reveal a bit more of herself on screen.
“There were quite stark differences in that Marissa is a very warm character —she’s a very maternal character,” Snook said, noting that these qualities are present even before her son goes missing. “That was something that I wanted to bring to the screen and share that’s close to my personality.”
Snook admits that most of Marissa’s core was “tricky” to find, given the majority of her scenes take place with her in “high trauma” mode following her son’s disappearance, with Snook noting “she’s always at 100 in this world.” For that reason, it was the scenes taking place prior to the trauma that helped Snook get a baseline for Marissa, pointing to an Episode 1 scene where Marissa realizes she’s wearing the same dress as Dakota Fanning’s Jenny while at a school function.
“She doesn’t go, ‘Oh God, I gotta leave.’ She doesn’t bitch her out or anything like that — She’s like, ‘Let’s celebrate. This is kind of great,’” Snook said. “That just is intrinsically who Marissa is — She’s very welcoming, and she wants to make sure everyone’s okay.”
However, once the kidnapping kicks off a police investigation, Marissa becomes “piano wire tension all the time” and deeply affected, a “febrile space” which Snook revealed was tricky but enjoyable to inhabit. The challenge then became finding a range to Marissa’s crises.
“You got to find different ways to color it so it … gives some light and shade and some nuance and different transitions and modes and find ways to enter a scene differently,” Snook said. “Maybe that’s having a different piece of music, or maybe that’s just a different tone to enter in, or a mood.”
Even in Marissa’s heightened state, her friendship with Jenny was her safe space, with Snook and Fanning aiming to portray “the ease and the lightness between the two women …. that felt like a warm kernel of safety.” “Marissa and Jenny’s friendship was a space that both of them could relax and both of them could have respite from what’s happening in the world,” Snook said.
Snook also served as an executive producer for “All Her Fault,” a role that Snook has only taken on once before in the 2023 film “Run Rabbit Run,” but had been hoping to practice at again.
“[It’s] one of those things where you’re working on projects and seeing how things … maybe that could work a little better, or if I had an opportunity to be in charge, I might instill these kinds of things, and here was an opportunity to do that, and to practice and exercise that muscle,” she said.
One tweak Snook and Gallagher made early on as they brought the adaptation to life was gender-swapping the lead detective in charge of the case, who was a woman in the book for the role that was played by Michael Peña in the Peacock series. “We felt that the social commentary that we wanted to explore in the screen version was more interesting if we made the detective a man [and] surrounding these two women, well, three women, but Jenny and Marissa, more pertinently, with male characters as antagonists,” Snook said.
Being an EP also enabled Snook to institute sustainability practices on set, which included putting an EV charger at the studios in Melbourne, where the series was shot, and having electric vehicles transport cast and crew, eliminating carbon emissions by running the unit base on hydrogenated vegetable oil, as well as including sustainable food practices like composting waste and using reusable coffee cups, plates and water bottles.
With Snook’s “Dorian Gray” run on the West End and Broadway sandwiching her time filming “All Her Fault,” the actress said she’ll be taking a break from theater for a bit, but when she goes back, she’d love to do so “with someone else on stage.”
As far as her other Hollywood pursuits, Snook said she would love to do “a really good film with a great director.” I love a challenge,” she said. “I don’t know what that is, maybe a period drama.”
“All Her Fault” is now streaming on Peacock.