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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Today, Michelle Williams talks about starring in Dying for Sex, a dark but funny series based on a true story about a woman with stage four cancer who, facing death, decides to take ownership of her sexual pleasure.
It's something Williams says she herself didn't really consider until recently.
The consideration of one's own pleasure was not in the conversation when I was coming of age.
It was, first of all, you shouldn't do it.
If you have to, you'll probably suffer a tragedy, get sick, or die.
Also, we hear from Sarah Snook.
She's best known for her role on HBO's Succession as Shiv Roy.
Snook was recently nominated for a Tony for her performance on Broadway and the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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Deadline puts it, there won't be a dry eye in the house.
Eleanor the Great, only in theaters September 26th.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Sometimes a show reaches out and grabs you by the collar with its honesty.
That's what happened after I watched the first episode of the new FX series Dying for Sex.
I knew immediately that I had to watch the rest of it alone.
I needed to sit with it, to cry without feeling self-conscious, to laugh without an audience, because the show is so intimate, so distinctly human.
Adapted from the Wondery podcast of the same name and based on a true story.
Dying for Sex follows a woman named Molly, played by my guest today, Michelle Williams.
Molly leaves her marriage after a terminal breast cancer diagnosis and embarks on a sexual adventure.
But that doesn't even scratch the surface.
Yes, there is sex, sometimes kinky, a little awkward, often hilarious.
But the show is really about everything surrounding it.
It's about what happens when the fear of dying outweighs the fear of never having truly lived.
It's about how trauma gets stored in the female body.
It's about reclaiming pleasure, even after we've been told that it doesn't belong to us.
In this scene that I'm about to play, Molly has just learned that her breast cancer has returned and is now stage four.
She begins meeting with a palliative care counselor for support.
I'm too young now.
And it sucks, okay?
I haven't done anything with my life.
I actually don't know what I like or what I want.
I've never even had an orgasm with another person.
And now I'm gonna die.
Good.
Molly.
Hey.
We have something for your list.
Dying for Sex is also a story about friendship.
Jenny Slate plays Nikki, Molly's best friend, who becomes her caretaker after Molly leaves her loving but emotionally unavailable husband.
And at times, their friendship feels like the real love story.
And did I mention that this is a comedy?
Michelle Williams has spent her career exploring the complexities and inner lives of women, from her breakout role as Jen Lindley on Dawson's Creek to Gwen Verdon in Fosse Verdon and the role of Mitzi Steven Spielberg's mother in The Fablemans.
She's been nominated five times for an Academy Award and has won two Golden Globes and took home an Emmy for her performance in Fosse Verdon.
A warning for those who might have children in the room.
We will be talking about sex and pleasure during this conversation.
Michelle Williams, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really thrilled to be here with you.
The wonderful thing about this job is we get previews and we kind of watch it together, kind of like a date night, you know.
And after that first episode, I said, I have to watch it alone.
I watched the whole series by myself.
And then, of course, I went to him sobbing, telling him all about it.
And I heard you had a similar experience after listening to the podcast that this is based on.
I did.
It unraveled me.
And I went back to listen to it for a second time to try and figure out why it had this power over me.
And then there I was on the floor again with no sense of what had really just happened.
And I listened to the podcast in tandem with reading the first, the pilot episode written by Liz Merriweather and Kim Rosenstock.
And those companion pieces for me cast such a spell that I immediately, for reasons that I couldn't understand and were beyond me, knew that I wanted to make this.
Have you come to understand the core of that emotion, where that kind of like magical thing came from within you that knew this was something you had to do?
I think it's a lot of things, but if I could put one pin in it, it would be that it's possible to be both scared and brave at the same time.
And that's what I think moved me so much about Molly's journey and this best friendship.
Yes, this is definitely a series about friendship.
And Almost how, like our female friendships, we can have soulmates with each other.
You know, we often think of that in the romantic context.
Jenny Slate played your best friend.
And what chemistry you guys had.
I actually heard something like...
I think the test read that you all did, you came, you arrived in the same outfit, or something like that.
Yeah, it was like when you were a kid, you know, and you would call your best friend and say what are we doing?
You know, the black t-shirt and the white shorts.
And that's how we showed up.
I knew that we would part and come back together.
You know, we had this reading, this moment, but already the connection was made and we We knew that we would go down this road together.
And the sweet, very sweet ending to the story is she's moving to Brooklyn, where I live and Liz lives.
Wait, you mean Jenny Slate?
Jenny Slate.
So in real life, right?
You all became friends in real life.
Yeah, we're hitching our wagons together.
You seem to be someone who really values friendship, almost in a way that is kind of communal.
I've heard you just talk throughout your career about the friends that you've collected over time, that have become kind of like your family.
That's very true.
I'm thinking of all the friends that I've lived with.
In what really felt like a commune for a while.
There was a period of my life where we had room to share and my friends came to make our house feel like a home.
One of my best friends, Daphne.
We slept in the same bed for years, and another friend Jeremy, lived downstairs, and then their friends would be there.
It was a kind of like a real open-door policy to create a sense of community.
I want to talk a little bit more about friendship, but I want to talk about sex for a minute, okay?
Sex is a proxy for so many things, although sex in this series is kind of spoken about in a literal sense and like the things that you want to do before you pass.
One of the things I think I heard you say is like I have never had to do on screen like perform self-pleasure.
Right.
I wanted to ask you about that because that act is so intimate.
We do it without being self-conscious because we're often alone.
And here you are in front of an entire crew, right?
I can imagine.
What was it like and how were you able to get to that truth for yourself and in those moments when you had to act out those scenes?
So the thing that I'm always looking for, and I think the reason that I go to work, is to expand my sense of freedom and that the moments between action and cut, that is a very safe space, because nothing bad can truly happen there.
The worst that can happen to me is that I feel embarrassed, and But that's not going to destroy me, nor is it going to stop me.
So I have to continue to tell myself that that is my time to get free.
And that's kind of my mantra, get free, get free, get free.
And so I return again to that idea of it is possible to be both scared and brave at the same time.
Mm-hmm.
So I had to tell myself that a lot before those scenes and really hold on to this idea of relaxation, expansion and freedom.
One of the other things I was thinking about is you know when I was coming of age?
Of course we know like sex is for everyone.
But really the message that you're told, as a woman, is that sex is for men and that you're performing for them.
This series actually made me kind of think about that in new ways at this old age that I hadn't thought about.
What about for you?
Same, same.
The consideration of one's own pleasure was not...
In the conversation when I was coming of age, it was, listen, first of all, you shouldn't do it.
Yeah, right.
If you have to, you'll probably suffer a tragedy, get sick or die.
Right, right.
So it seemed pretty scary and loaded.
And it's certainly taken me a long time. to unpack.
And I just, I do believe that things will be different for my daughter.
Oh, say more.
What do you mean?
I see her generation and their radical acceptance of each other and themselves.
And I see them working together with more equality than certainly what I was raised with.
Look, I hope I'm not just talking about Brooklyn.
When you're talking about Brooklyn, where you guys live.
No, I think I know what you mean because I have an 18-year-old daughter.
And every time I listen to she and her friends I think like wow, I mean, they're just so far and beyond where I was at that age.
That's what I think.
I just think, oh, she's just light years ahead of where I maybe even am.
She teaches me everything. she is proud of me and accepting of me and even this show she's like you go mom or like I did a magazine cover that was racy and she said you look amazing and so I don't know if it's cultural I don't know if it's familial I don't know if it's title I don't know if it's but I'm seeing a rapid push and developmental readiness as it relates to my daughter Thinking back to something you were saying about friendship and that communal connection that you've been able to foster and feel with friends, your eldest daughter, Matilda's dad, is the late Heath Ledger.
And you've spoken so beautifully about your friend and award-winning actor, Jeremy Strong, how he was such a strong presence in your life after Heath's death.
Almost like he moved in quite literally and became what you needed in that moment.
Can you share what it meant to have a friend like that during such a profound time in your life?
Well, that was the period of time in my life when there were sort of multiple people going in and out of that house.
Like I referenced my friend Daphne.
We shared a bedroom and a closet and a bathroom.
And then Jeremy was there.
My sister was there.
We had a name.
I think maybe Jeremy came up with it.
And he called it Fort Awesome.
Wow.
And it was like Pippi Longstocking or something, something what you imagine as a child.
You know.
You imagine this place where you could go and you could make some of the rules and you would be together and there would be.
He had sort of imagined this place as a child that he, his child mind, would call Fort Awesome.
And he said, I think that was kind of like what that time was.
It was like Fort Awesome.
What did that look like?
Because I think you said like you described Jeremy, as serious enough to hold the weight of a child's broken heart, which is so powerful and sensitive enough to approach her through play.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That was, that's my friend.
That's who I've known for a long time.
That's who I know now and raise my children with great proximity to his children.
But that, at the heart of what he does and who he is, that maybe you don't get to witness if you don't know him in the way that I do, is this delight in play.
So he would be engaged for as long as Matilda was.
Want it to be on fairy princesses or tea parties or dress up.
Our guest today is award-winning actor Michelle Williams, star of the FX series Dying for Sex.
We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
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Let's go back to the Dawson's Creek days, okay?
So your breakout role was as Jen Lindley.
She's this rebellious girl from New York City who goes to Capeside to live with her conservative grandmother.
You were 16 years old, right?
I was, yes, 16.
Yes.
It just sounds like it was a big moment for you in understanding who you are and your taste.
What was it about that experience that kind of was that flashpoint for you?
Well, something that happened to me when I was making that show is that I met Mary Beth Peel, who played my Grams.
And Mary Beth Peel is an esteemed, beloved New York stage actress.
And she showed me plays.
And then I started going up to New York City sometimes.
I would get in my car in North Carolina and I would drive 12 hours for the weekend.
By yourself?
By myself.
I would go see a movie and a play and walk this little stretch of 6th Avenue.
And then I would get in my car and drive 12 hours home.
And what I started seeing when I got to New York City were ideas of things that I would like to be a part of.
And then I had this woman, Mary Beth, who was encouraging me and saying that I should try and that she thought that I could.
And that was at a time when nobody had ever said anything like that to me before that I could be in movies or I could be in plays, or I could make things that mattered to me happen.
I'd come from a very different environment.
I'd been working on and off as an actor in Los Angeles.
I'd been working since I was 12.
I was emancipated at 15 and living on my own for about I don't know half a year or something before I got Dawson's Creek.
And so I was coming from...
Los Angeles and this sort of idea of you know, if you can get a national commercial, it'll last you a year.
And that's what I wanted for myself.
If you could get on a TV show, you could support yourself.
And that's what I wanted for myself.
And then I went to New York City and I thought I was introduced to this whole other expression of the medium that I'd never been exposed to.
I think growing up, I'd just seen The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins and things like that.
I didn't really know what was possible.
Yeah.
And then I started to make New York City home.
I did my first play there when I was 18 and it became the place that I would spend the summers and the weekends and just kind of a place that I thought oh, I could make a life for myself here.
Because you didn't go to formal school, of course.
Now you've lived the school of life like 10 times over, right?
But do you feel any insecurity about that?
Or does that ever come up for you?
Where you're thinking about like this is a bit of knowledge that maybe, if I had gone to school, I would have known it.
Oh, all the time.
I am constantly confronted by the things that I don't know and real gaps where information should be.
Geography.
Okay, yeah.
I could go on and on.
But I think maybe that's why work has become, you know, that's my conduit to the world.
Without it, I really had nothing to show for myself.
I had no institution behind me that said, I accredit you in this particular way.
And so then where do you get a good feeling about yourself?
So my work has meant so much to me because it's been, it was where I got to know myself.
And I thought well, maybe if I could get a little bit good at this thing, I could get a.
I want to ask you about a really big moment in 2019 your Emmy Award speech, when you won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series for Fosse-Verdon.
I want to play a little bit of it and then we'll talk about it briefly on the other side.
Let's listen.
I see this as an acknowledgement of what is possible when a woman is trusted to discern her own needs, feels safe enough to voice them and respected enough that they'll be heard.
When I asked for more dance classes, I heard yes.
More voice lessons, yes.
A different wig, a pair of fake teeth not made out of rubber, yes.
And all of these things.
They require effort and they cost more money, but my bosses never presumed to know better than I did about what I needed in order to do my job and honor Gwen Verdon.
And so I want to say thank you so much to FX and to Fox 21 Studios for supporting me completely and for paying me equally, because they understood.
Because they understood that when you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value.
And then where do they put that value?
They put it into their work.
And so the next time a woman, and especially a woman of color, because she stands to make 52 cents on the dollar compared to her white male counterpart.
Tells you what she needs in order to do her job.
Listen to her.
Believe her.
Because one day she might stand in front of you and say thank you for allowing her to succeed because of her workplace environment and not in spite of it.
Thank you.
That was my guest, Michelle Williams, in 2019.
I still get chills when I hear it.
You were so profound and clear-eyed.
I always wonder, do you practice the speech before you go up there?
Because that's such a detailed speech.
Thank you.
I spent a long time working on it.
My hands are like this.
My heart is like this.
And I was pregnant at the time.
And so, you know, also experiencing that.
But I felt so connected in that moment to have had these experiences that allowed me to be the conduit for the message.
These years later, do you feel?
How are you feeling in this moment, as someone who you like spent your career really trying to show the inner like us as women, like you're trying to show the totality of us as human beings?
And now we're in 2025.
You're finding so much in your daughter Matilda, but then there's so much in the world that we're up against.
Now, five years later, how are you six years later?
What are you reflecting on when you hear that speech?
We're not where I thought we would be.
The opportunities of those moments of the Me Too movement, of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I hope that they are underground and that they will come back and that there will be a resurgence of the optimism and the momentum that we were enjoying.
Are you feeling optimistic?
No, are you?
I'm thinking about what you said about your daughter.
I feel optimism when I look at my kids.
Yeah, I feel optimistic about them.
Yeah.
I feel optimistic when I watch shows like Dying for Sex, which was hugely meaningful to me.
And you said, like you take a piece of every project and character and you grow with it and it goes to the next thing for you.
What are you taking away from dying for sex?
Pleasure, baby, pleasure.
Get it.
Get it.
It belongs to you.
And that humor is not a way to make a joke in a sad situation, that humor is a way to make something whole and complete and also a way to remember something better.
We don't want to remember the sad times.
We want to remember the good times, the happy times.
And so if you can find...
There's a line from a poet that I like, the light underbelly of the dark, dark beast.
You will be able to transport yourself back to those moments and relive them and be there with them.
It just needs to be found.
So the insistence on continuing to find the humor, but most of all the pleasure, because they can't take that away from us.
Man, this has been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for being here.
German-born writer Daniel Kelman was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 for his novel Till.
His latest novel, The Director, is set largely in Nazi Germany and raises questions about art and collaboration.
Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has this review.
In the German legend, Faust signs a contract with the devil, exchanging his immortal soul for vast knowledge and other earthly rewards.
It's a cut-and-dried transaction.
In Daniel Kelman's new novel, The Director, The demonic deal-making is murkier, more drawn out.
Little by little, a series of compromises eat away like acid at the integrity of a once great artist.
Not only is Kelman's rendering of the Faustian bargain more psychologically plausible than the original, but it takes its inspiration from a true life story.
The director is an historical novel based on the life of G.W.
Pabst, the early film director who worked with actresses like Louise Brooks, Lottie Lenya and Greta Garbo.
Pabst's career moves were circuitous and puzzling, which makes him a tasty subject for historical fiction.
He was born in Austria and worked in theater in New York as a young man.
Then, after World War I, he became one of the most influential directors in Germany.
Pabst moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and was a temporary and less successful member of that émigré colony of filmmakers that included Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang.
On a trip to France in 1939 to make a film and visit his mother, Pabst was stranded by the outbreak of war and returned to Nazi Germany.
Entered the devil in the form of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
In Kelman's reimagining, Goebbels cunningly wields a stick and a carrot.
He alternates the accusation that Pabst was a communist who belongs in a concentration camp with appeals to Pabst's ego, bruised by Hollywood's treatment of him as a highbrow hack.
In Germany.
Goebbels promises Pabst will make artistic films, sublime films, films that touch the German hearts of good deep, metaphysical people.
To oppose the American cheap commercial trash with a resounding no.
It's an offer Pabst feels he can't refuse.
As a novel.
The director itself joins the pleasures of commercial fiction with the moral weight of a novel of ideas.
Kelman clearly has fun vividly invoking a sun-splashed Hollywood party where Billy Wilder cavorts in a cowboy hat and studio execs casually confuse the émigré filmmakers with one another.
But comedy turns sinister and surreal in later sections, where Pabst and his family return to their castle in Germany, where the caretaker, now the local Nazi party leader, relegates them to the basement.
And then there's the absurdist scene where Pabst directs close Hitler, confidant Leni Reifenstahl in an imagined film.
As the extras shipped in from a nearby detention camp.
Look on, Reifenstahl insists that Pabst retake the scene some 21 times.
Each time, Reifenstahl's performance is terrible.
But Pabst quickly catches on that it's dangerous to tell her anything, but it's perfect, just perfect again.
Perhaps Kelman's greatest accomplishment is that he manages to raise larger themes through compact dialogues.
Here, for instance, is a conversation about art and morality that he conjures up between Pabst and his wife Trudy, who was an actress and writer.
All this will pass, Pabst tells Trudy, but art remains.
Even if it remains, Trudy asks, the art, doesn't it remain soiled?
Doesn't it remain bloody and dirty?
Pabst responds this way.
And the Renaissance?
What about the Borgias and their poisonings?
What about Shakespeare, who had to make accommodations with Elizabeth?
He adds, the important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.
Referencing his film Paracelsus, Papps says Paracelsus will still be watched 50 years from now, when this nightmare is long forgotten.
When do compromises turn into full-blown capitulation?
How many accommodations can someone make with evil before they themselves become part of the evil?
Do we forget nightmares, or is history just the reliving of them over and over again?
The director doesn't answer these questions, cannot answer them, but it leaves them rattling around in our minds like a roulette wheel that never stops spinning.
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.
She reviewed The Director by Daniel Kelman.
Coming up, we hear from actress Sarah Snook.
She played Shiv Roy in Succession and was just nominated for a Tony for her role in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
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Our next guest is Sarah Snook.
She's best known for playing Shiv Roy on the show Succession.
Now she's on Broadway in a one-person show, an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Last week, she received a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Play.
She spoke with Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado.
It's hard to describe Sarah Snook's performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Snook plays all 26 characters in this stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel from 1890.
It feels like you're watching a two-hour sprint.
She's giving a nonstop monologue, a crazy athletic solo performance.
For those who don't remember this Gothic horror story, it's about a young man, Dorian Gray, who falls in love with his own beauty when an artist friend paints a portrait of him.
He loves his own image so much that he makes a wish, a Faustian bargain, that allows him to stay young and beautiful while his portrait ages and decays.
The show uses pre-recorded snippets of Snook playing different characters, projected on huge video screens.
There are cameras, iPhones and lightning-quick costume and set changes all used to tell this story that culminates in Dorian spiraling and ultimately facing his sins and his mortality.
When Sarah Snook did this play for a run in London last year, it earned her an Olivier Award.
Sarah Snook, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Well, the creator of this adaptation, Kip Williams, a fellow Australian, when he approached you about taking on this role or these roles, what was your response?
I read that you said that if you had seen the show, you might not have agreed to do it.
Yes.
Well, I was pregnant at the time and I think I was like seven months or something and my first baby, and so that kind of ignorance is bliss kind of world of what is to come, and the efforts of parenting at the same time as doing this particular show was um, if i had seen the show, i think my husband, particularly if he'd seen the show he would have said this is not, this is not a good idea, this is not something you do if you have a newborn.
This is not possible.
I mean, it's not impossible obviously but um, it takes a lot of concentration and support, not just from myself, from from the family and from my team.
As we've mentioned, you play all characters in this show and you're also the narrator of this story.
How do you differentiate between the characters?
Do you develop the characters in the same way you would if you were just playing one part in a play, if you were slumming it and only playing one part?
How am I going to go back to just playing one character?
I don't know what comes after this, what tops this sort of overstimulation of characters.
To differentiate between the characters, I think lots of different things.
In some ways, a blessing and a curse.
We had only two weeks of rehearsals before doing the pre-recorded portion of the show at the end of 2023.
And so it really meant that I had to make sharp and considered decisions quite early.
And part of that was created out of doing a lot of voice work with Geraldine Cook, my voice coach in Australia, and working on what timbre and tone and pitch and speed, pace et cetera each of the characters had and accent, as well as what physicality came from that.
It's very much a physical sensation of each character sits somewhere differently in my body.
And how do you develop these different voices?
If you could talk a little bit more about that.
And then how do you keep them straight?
I think the process of finding it in the body, with the voice and the physicality, really helped, because when I come to perform them, you know the Basil, for instance, is very the tone of his voice or the, The temper of his voice perhaps, is quite brittle.
Basil is the artist who did the portrait.
Basil Horwood, yeah.
He's the artist.
So he sort of sits quite on the gum ridge, just behind the teeth.
And there's something centralized, I guess.
Like, it's very focused down and right.
It's hard to explain, actually, now that I'm thinking about it.
So there's quite an expansive quality to Lord Henry and there's something that's very somewhat like molasses, like he's very juicy, and also something about aristocratic British men who are able to hold court and speak, you know, widely on subjects.
Lord Henry has quite a deep voice, but he...
They actually have quite a range of pitch in their voices.
And if you listen to Stephen Fry, he's talking up right at the top level of his pitch and then right down at the bottom in the same sentence.
And it really holds your attention.
And that was something we really wanted to find for Lord Henry.
Now in an interview, I heard you say that when you were a kid you used to love listening to cassettes of poems of Roald Dahl.
And you used to memorize them.
And I tried to find it online.
I couldn't actually find it.
But I was thinking that if you memorize those poems and they were read by British actors, listening could have been like great training for you doing The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is a bunch of different flowery British characters.
It absolutely was.
It was such a strange thing to have as a reference, like a real body reference really, from my childhood, of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes which, weirdly enough, I think Miriam Margulies read one of the characters or one of the poems.
And when I met her I didn't realize this until I'd, until I was thinking about the Roald Dahl's uh element of it all and went back I was like, oh man, I should have told her that she was such an inspiration to me as a kid, through her voice, through the, the ability like how her storytelling and characters really spoke to me when I was a kid.
Through the help of cameras and recordings of you doing the other parts, you're actually acting opposite yourself.
Is it odd to be acting with yourself as a scene partner?
And this is like a version of yourself that was recorded a few years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's really strange.
It's really strange, because well, what it does, particularly because I can't see myself ever really.
There's only once that I can see myself, which is the character of Alan Campbell.
But otherwise I just have to listen to the audio recording aspect of it, because I'm either back of stage or I'm in front of the screen or I'm behind the screen.
I can't I can't interact with it in that way.
It really forces you to listen to what the person is saying, to what I'm saying, and forces you to be really imaginative, really engage with your imagination and how that makes you feel and what, what words are springing out to you tonight and what parts of the tone or how it's been delivered are springing out.
And maybe that's come from.
Yeah, listening to audiobooks when I was a kid a lot and having that imagination sustained in that way.
Well, the performance is highly choreographed.
You have to be very precise.
You have to get to a mark or where you're supposed to be in time for you to interact with a recording of that you performed as another character.
You say there are sequences where you have like seconds to get lines out.
Otherwise, the scene cues will be off.
Yeah, they'll just keep going.
They're the worst kind of actors that I'm working with.
They don't wait for you.
They don't wait for me at all.
They'll just barrel on, and if I don't keep up, it's my fault.
Yeah, I mean, the hardest one of that is the Lord Henry sequence in the dinner party scene, where there's seven and you're playing all those seven other guests.
Yeah, how many is it dorian?
Two three four five six six, i think.
Um yeah, i'm all of the, it's all me.
You're playing all the other guests yes, but you know, like i don't I think of them as me at all.
I think of them as the characters.
One thing I want to add about the play is that it's funny.
Not only the turns of phrases or the performance, but there's also this cheekiness to it.
Like the narrator is a bit cheeky.
And there are also other choices that you make.
The way you switch from character to character can be quite funny.
Yeah, I mean, it is a lot of fun to do.
And the narrator really is, in a sense, Oscar Wilde.
I'm not playing him as a character, but there is his energy and his wit is definitely infused naturally into that role because it is the character based on the prose of the book.
Kip's turned a Victorian novel into a play and a Victorian novel that wasn't meant to be read out loud.
It wasn't like a Dickens or anything like that.
It was meant to be read and in episodic form in a way.
So it's somewhat difficult to turn that into dialogue as well as into something that is accessible to an audience now.
And part of creating that has been to keep the wit that Oscar Wilde has inherently in that text.
I want to ask about Succession.
The show is about a rich and powerful family.
The patriarch, Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, runs a media company.
His health is deteriorating and his children are jockeying for control of the company, for power and, of course, for their dad's love.
You said that originally you didn't want to audition for the role of Shiv Roy.
I'm guessing this would have been like over or around 10 years ago now.
Why didn't you think the role was right for you at the time?
I think, because I personally don't have any experience by association or proximity with wealth at that level.
But I also didn't understand the show so much.
And I didn't at that time want to be a secondary kind of handbag character to the men in the show who were going to be.
I think Billions had just come out and I was like, oh yeah, I can see that.
It's straight white men in business, and there's no room for me there.
So I don't think I'll have a very interesting through line and maybe I don't think I'm going to get this role anyway, so I don't want to audition.
And my friend.
I was auditioning for something else and already had hair and makeup on, which is such an effort when you're doing self-tapes.
I don't know.
Other people might not think it is, but I find it a real effort doing a self-tape in the first place.
But I was doing a self-tape for something else.
And so my friend did just read the lines.
Just have fun.
Let's just try and do it.
And I am forever grateful for her.
Do you remember what you did or what your take on it was that might have sort of even though you originally didn't think it was the role for you made them take note of you to be Shiv.
I don't know.
I mean, there probably was a level of insouciance or attitude about not feeling right for this and, like you know, without using it as a succession word, F you for making me audition for this when I you know I'm not right for this.
Like that's a bit shiv to be honest.
Like that's like a little above it, but also like showing up angry and wanting to win the test.
Yeah, exactly.
There you go.
Yeah.
Well, it occurred to me that the way Succession was filmed may have had some similarities to the way you perform your current role in Dorian Gray.
I think that for Succession, there were numerous cameras following the cast as they did scenes, kind of like the cameras that follow you on stage.
Are there similarities?
Yeah.
Yeah, there are similarities.
I mean very different in terms of the specificity required for Dorian and the fluidity allowed in succession.
But something about the proximity of cameras and the kind of subtextual or subconscious awareness of them as a character is in both Succession and Dorian has been really useful to have experienced that in Succession.
It was never like.
They are definitely a character and we're going to dramaturgically make them feel like that.
But just the presence of Gregor, one of the camera operators.
At one point he was on the other side of the couch.
I was doing the scene.
He's behind my back on the other side of the couch.
I look over.
Yep, he's still behind me on the other side of the couch.
And within three seconds I turn and throw another line back over my shoulder and he's right behind me.
He has crossed the couch somehow.
He's like leapt over it with a camera in hand.
And that kind of agility from the camera operators, both in Dorian and Succession, is very similar.
Wait.
So you would sort of perform the scenes, and it was kind of the camera people's job to sort of anticipate where you might go with it.
Yeah, in some sense, yeah.
We would do a director's rehearsal and we would know the approximate areas that we would need to be in.
And then the camera operators, with direction from the cinematographer and the director, would be telling them you know, be in this okay, double down on that line, keep going.
Or, you know, do a crash, zoom to here or there, like being in the right areas and the right spots.
We would tend to light uh, the room for the scene, or light one side and then the other side.
So there was no like coming down the line, set up, set up, set up, changing the.
It was very just – yeah, a lot of freedom in that way of working.
And I loved it.
It was great.
It meant that the scenes really had a lot of energy between the characters and that we – in that particular way of working, we had a lot of – space to fill in the gaps.
I think.
And that was where you know the camera operators and the DP knew okay.
Well, we know that Sarah's in the corner on this in this setup, but actually she's been told.
You know, as is always the case in succession, you're likely to be on camera.
So have an opinion on everything, like, you know, just be acting.
You can't just sit back and relax for a moment.
And that kind of attention to what's happening in front of you is really fun to work with, but then also was really valuable for transitioning onto something like Dorian, because you're never sitting back.
You're never, oh, I'm not on camera so I can just switch off for a second.
You're always on.
You're on stage.
You're always on.
Yeah, the thing about your character Shiv, she's an observer.
She sometimes hangs back and watches as her brothers, her father, people in the company interact.
And she seems to process it.
And you can see that on your face.
Can you talk about how you thought about Shiv as an observer?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes it just came out of me as Sarah and feeling like I couldn't compete in the level of like comedy, humor or improv that Kieran, at the level that he's able to deliver.
So half the time it was like I just keep my mouth shut and have an opinion that I'll keep to myself.
The camera will pick it up.
And that sort of somewhat developed into a character choice as much as it was an acting choice, an actor's choice.
But yeah, I think it's right for her though, as the younger sister of of oftentimes a room full of men, you're just kind of like all right, let me watch my stupid older brother and my even stupider older brother and my even stupider older brother fight themselves out and tear themselves down and get themselves into a knot.
And then here I am, Dad.
I've just been sitting here.
There's a cunningness and a cunning quality to Shiv and AM.
A part of that is just being the observer and waiting her turn.
Well, Sarah Snook, thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Nice to chat.
Sarah Snook spoke with Anne-Marie Baldonado.
Snook recently received a Tony nomination for her leading role in the stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway, where she plays all 26 characters.
Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
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With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.
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