Succession's Sarah Snook refuses to conform to Hollywood female body ideals

Succession has returned for its final season – and Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv Roy, is once again gracing our screens with her starring role as the Roy family's formidable only daughter – and the series' female lead.

Season four will see the super-wealthy, dysfunctional family unit continue their internal strife over who gets to be the successor of the Roystar Wayco media conglomerate, headed up by their billionaire father Logan Roy. Sarah, together with her husband Tom, battles it out with Roman & Kendall in all-out sibling warfare, as the threat of the sale to tech entrepreneur Lukas Matsson grows ever more likely.

Fans' excitement for the show has been pretty much non-stop ever since season 4 premiered over the week on Sunday March 26, with notable excitement over Sarah's performance in the first episode – including several comments on Twitter that she should “win an Emmy” for her performance in the next awards season.

But this isn't the only major thing going on in the 35-year-old Australian actor's life. Last week, Sarah chose the season 4 premiere event in New York as her big moment to reveal she is pregnant with her first child with husband, Australian comedian Dave Lawson, debuting her baby bump in a form-fitting black bodysuit and floor-length silver cardigan.

In light of Sarah Snook's return to our screens, and her exciting personal life news, we've revisiting exclusive comments she made in a previous GLAMOUR Unfiltered interview on the subject of Hollywood female body ideals. 

“I'm learning to deal with it I guess. I still feel very at the beginning of a lot of things in my career, and my personhood, womanhood, and sort of working it out as I go along,” she said, speaking to us back in October 2021 ahead of the release of the show's third season.

“But I've certainly always felt pretty strongly about being proud of oneself...oftentimes I find, as a woman, you're more likely to be far more cruel to yourself than you ever are about other people or to other people and so why can't you give yourself the grace and kindness as well? And that's not always easy, of course.”

In the same interview, Sarah also opened up about developing an “older sister character" to battle her inner critic in moments where she was having self-doubt – for instance when “not fitting into a dress”. 

“I sort of developed an older sister character for a while. If I was having a fit about not fitting into a dress in the way that I wanted to, or not feeling the right sort of confidence level that I wanted to, it was like 'Well, what are you going to do about this Sarah? Are you just going to complain all day or all night, or are you going to buck up and get out there and do something?'”

You can watch the rest of the interview here:

Season 4 will be the last season of the hit HBO family drama series – in news that has devastated fans. “It’s pretty definitively the end,” the show's creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong told The New Yorker last February. 

Filming began in June 2022, and went on as late as January 2023, with Snook revealing to the LA Times that she was pregnant during the latter stages of filming: "“But it was pretty easy to hide. It’s really only in the last three weeks or so that I’ve popped.” She is due in mid-May, according to the publication.

The first episode of Succession season 4 was released on Sunday 26 March, airing exclusively on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV in the UK. New episodes of the 10-part season will drop on successive Sundays. 

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