“Sorry, I had to change a quick nappy—my daughter,” Sarah Snook says while logging in a few minutes late to Zoom so we can discuss All Her Fault, an eight-episode Peacock limited series premiering November 6. It’s an apt introduction to the actor, who in May 2023 announced that she had welcomed her first child just after the series finale of Succession. She won an Emmy for playing an expectant—but no less Machiavellian—Shiv Roy on HBO’s hit drama. Then she, her husband (Australian comedian Dave Lawson), and their newborn baby traveled to London for her role in the dizzying one-woman show The Picture of Dorian Gray, for which Snook won an Olivier award, then later a Tony after its Broadway run.
So what does one do in the midst of new motherhood and a run that gets you halfway to EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) status? If you’re Sarah Snook, it’s diving right back into themes of maternal strife with All Her Fault. Adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Andrea Mara, the series stars Snook as Marissa Irvine, a high-powered mother who arrives at 14 Arthur Avenue expecting to pick up her young son, Milo, from his first playdate with a boy at his new school. But the woman who answers the door isn’t that boy’s mother—or the nanny Marissa has hired to keep her son safe—in fact, the woman who answers has no idea who Milo is.
“When you say it out loud, I go, ‘What was I thinking?’” Snook says when recounting how she chose to bridge the gap between award-winning West End and Broadway runs of Dorian Gray, in which she plays 26 different characters. “But we didn’t know whether Broadway was triple confirmed—then I just [went in] blind.”
Snook can trace her daughter’s milestones through the life of the production of Dorian Gray. She was six months old at rehearsals, turned one during the West End stint, then two backstage at the Great White Way. Sandwiched in between those runs, All Her Fault became the place where Snook could channel the frustrations of, say, keeping her household healthy during the monthslong stretches of Dorian Gray. If not, “The show doesn’t happen and the person who saved their money and booked [a ticket] from Argentina just doesn’t get to see it,” says Snook. “So there’s a lot of pressure.”
There was also looming expectation about which TV project Snook would choose to follow her Emmy-winning four-season stint on Succession. But she had to give up that ghost in order to focus on a new chapter. “Succession was such an incredible thing to be a part of. Nothing can or ever will probably top that,” says Snook. “Early on in your career it’s like, ‘What’s the biggest, next best thing?’ It’s like, ‘Well, actually, you’ve done it. You’ve done Succession.’ So let’s not sully the memory of that by trying to top it.”
For Snook, becoming a mother was bookended by extreme depictions of the act. “To be pregnant in one show and then have your child go missing in the other—let’s hope that’s not the motherhood journey for most,” she jokes. “There’s a different kind of attention to those roles that I can bring now from being a mom, and also a depth of feeling that I wouldn’t have understood prior to having a kid. Thinking back on other shows where I’ve been a mom, [I’m] going, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to watch that because I would’ve made different choices if I was actually a parent.’”
All Her Fault didn’t afford Snook any respite from the weight of being a mother: “One of the first notes that I wrote on my script was, ‘Must find different ways to cry,’” she remembers now. But there was never a doubt that Snook would sign onto the project—she was drawn to the prospect of filming in her native Australia, but also to the show’s shocking conclusion. “It’s a real gift of a twist,” says Snook, “so I couldn’t say no.”
From Bad Sisters to Big Little Lies, there’s been no shortage of women-centered whodunits on prestige TV. But Carnival Films executive producing team Nigel Marchant and Gareth Neame, the Brits behind Downton Abbey, were nevertheless captivated by the story of an American woman who, as writer/executive producer Megan Gallagher puts it, is the CEO of both her company’s boardroom and all household affairs.
“This level of exhaustion of trying to do it all and the anger that is building with women—this assumption that it’s automatically their domain to manage everybody’s lives and happiness and well-being,” says Gallagher, “that [same] pressure just isn’t on men. It is so real and so prevalent, but we haven’t seen it on TV to the degree that we should have by now.”
After Milo goes missing, it is Snook’s Marissa, not her husband, Peter (The White Lotus’s Jake Lacy), who is expected to answer specific questions about their son’s life for authorities. “‘What’s the schoolteacher’s name? What was he wearing?’ That prejudice is immediate,” says Marchant. “We looked at a lot of those TikToks where people interview dads, but dad’s got no idea what their son’s girlfriend’s name is or what school they go to. They’re really funny, but they reveal something, don’t they?”
Marchant continues, “We didn’t want to do just another woman-in-peril thriller,” but instead focus on the familial elements that can fray when tragedy strikes. “How do the cracks within that family that have been buried for a long time open?” Neame asks. “We live in an age of equality in theory; the husband and wife may both be breadwinners, but somehow the woman still has to run all the domestic [duties] as well as hold down a professional job.”
Exploring this gender disparity through the engine of true crime has long resonated with a female audience. “One of the biggest demographics for Law & Order and NCIS is actually women,” says Snook. “Part of it is this uncontrollable, insatiable desire to know what happened. How do we avoid this? How do we spot the signs? We just want to solve a problem and learn from it in a funny kind of way.”
Marchant and Neame said casting a hot-off-Succession Snook had a similar effect to nabbing Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne for one of their last Peacock limited series The Day of the Jackal—namely, where high-caliber talent comes, others in that stratosphere follow. Like Dakota Fanning, who plays Jenny—the mother of the boy with whom Snook’s son was supposed to be on a playdate. Sharp Objects’ Sophia Lillis is the nanny Carrie; Insecure’s Jay Ellis and The Bear’s Abby Elliott play other members of Marissa and Peter’s inner circle. “There’s a real foundation of friendship with all the parents—the sisterhood that can come out of that was something that really attracted me to the job in the first place,” says Snook. “We worked hard to protect that in the story.”
An investigator into Milo’s disappearance, as played by End of Watch’s Michael Peña, who is the father of a child with a disability, serves a vital function to the story from a practical sense—but also a personal one for Gallagher. “My child has autism and is disabled, and a lot of that storyline came from my own life,” she tells VF. To play the parent of a child with such challenges meant casting someone as soulful as Peña. “Michael did a really, really great job of encapsulating the feeling of isolation. You’re not having the same experience as other parents. You’re not hitting the same milestones. You don’t have the same outlook for your child’s future,” she says. “You are on a lonely island. It might be an island full of tons and tons and tons of love, but it is a little lonely. Every time [Peña] walks on the screen, I kind of smile,” says Gallagher. “He just makes everything better that he’s in.”
Keeping a firm separation between work and life was key in keeping Snook’s own sanity as a first-time mother on All Her Fault, directed in part by 3 Body Problem’s Minkie Spiro and The Handmaid’s Tale’s Kate Dennis. “There was one moment where the director whispered in my ear to think of my daughter [during a scene],” says Snook. “I was like, ‘Nope, I’m out.’ It was a well-meaning direction, but if I’m thinking of that I go into a hypervigilant stress response: ‘We need to call the hospital. We need to call the police.’ Bringing in actual reality is less useful as a performer than using my imagination. But that’s just me: I see kids play and really believe that they are a dragon. I can access the same thing without thinking about my own daughter.”
With some time and distance from the emotionally charged experience, Snook has come to appreciate the level of difficulty that she and her costars rose to—particularly in the show’s propulsive conclusion. “The person with whom I’m in the revelation scene in the last episode really challenged themselves to go to a place that they’re not necessarily required to in other roles they’ve done,” she says cryptically. “They were so compelling and so fucking good—I’m exited for them.”
The post In All Her Fault, Sarah Snook Lives a Mother’s Worst Nightmare appeared first on Vanity Fair.
