Sarah Snook is probably a shoo-in for the Best Actress Emmy for her work in Succession’s final season. Whenever the Emmys eventually happen, I think Succession will largely sweep all of the major awards anyway, but Snook does deserve special mention and special attention. The way she played Shiv Roy was a revelation – Shiv gets in her own way, sells out everyone, compromises her principles at the drop of a hat and she’s constantly getting screwed over. Currently, Snook is home in Australia with her newborn baby girl, but she chatted with Variety for a pre-strike conversation as part of her Emmy campaign. Snook talks a lot about what she thinks would have been next for Shiv, had Succession kept going.

Reading the last Succession script: “I arrived and was like, ‘That’s it. It’s done.’ And I walked in, and Matthew was like, ‘No, I don’t think so. I think that’s quite hopeful! The last handhold, maybe there’s potential for what’s going to happen with Tom as CEO.’”

Why Shiv couldn’t vote for Kendall: Yet at the company’s boardroom showdown, as the members vote, Shiv wavers, and can’t bring herself to go through with it. “It’s just pure instinct,” she says. “I think it’s trigger response.” According to Snook, Shiv turns on Kendall when she sees him putting his feet up on their late father’s desk in the lead-up to the vote. “There’s something in her that goes, ‘Ahhhhh!’ — sorry to swear, but — ‘Motherf–ker!’ I don’t think she’s decided in that moment when they’re in Dad’s office to say no. But once it gets down to it in the room, she just can’t physically bear to say yes.”

She doesn’t believe Shiv was trying to plan it out: “I never really considered that Tom becoming CEO is Shiv, by proxy, winning, For Shiv, that is so not a win! That is ‘I’m once again power adjacent. I’m not the winner.’” Snook doesn’t think about Shiv’s future much, but when she does, she sees her going into “quite a deep postpartum depression.” About Shiv’s resigned look in that conclusion, she says, “I think the baby thing is really about to hit in a way that is inescapable.”

Kendall’s disgusting shake: Shiv spat into with each take — “and he drank it every time, because he is Jeremy,” Snook says. It was “maybe the closest to all three of us in our playful selves as actors — as Kieran, Sarah and Jeremy, not just Shiv, Roman and Kendall,” she says. “And because of it being the last scene of the series, we may have leant into personal sort of actor celebration, and indulgence of what’s going on.”

She cried through the finale: “Because I was sad for Shiv. She just tried so f–king hard, and ended up where she is — in this kind of gilded cage, next to the thing that she wants. And the journey’s not over for her. It’s not over for any of them, but still, she’s in the orbit of the CEO, and that will be really painful for her.”

Shiv & Roman: “I feel like Shiv and Roman would reconcile in a way where he would be the shitty but great weird uncle for her kid, and there might be some sort of strange little family unit that gets splintered off.”

[From Variety]

I absolutely believe that Shiv and Roman would find a way back to each other as dysfunctional brother and sister. Like, with no more company to fight over, Shiv and Roman would be able to figure out a way to be in each other’s lives, 100%. I’m not so sure about Kendall though. Poor Ken. I read that one idea was for Ken to try to throw himself into the river in his final scene but they thought it would be too dark. But that is very Ken – self-destructive, self-defeating, too impulsive. I also agree that Shiv and Tom are about to be miserable together for a long time.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images. Cover courtesy of Variety.