But season four, which begins on Monday March 27, will be the last. ‘I’ve never thought this could go on for ever,’ its (British) creator Jesse Armstrong said last month. ‘The end has always been kind of present in my mind.’
When I meet Snook, she is about to finish filming that season, after nine months spent mostly in New York but also in ‘an exotic location’. There are, she hints, some tasty surprises to look forward to. ‘We knew from the read-through of the last episode that it would be the final series; however the way the episode ends, a number of the cast felt that it was left somewhat ambiguous,’ is all she’ll say.
Season three ended on a cliffhanger, with Shiv and her siblings showing an unprecedented united front to scupper the deal their father was about to make: to finally sell off Waystar Royco. Their plan was to use their supermajority to stop the sale, and run the company together. When they arrived to confront him, they were thwarted by Logan, who announced that they no longer had the power to do so – their mother had sold them out. Shiv provided the perfect postscript: ‘We just walked in on Mom and Dad f—king us.’
When Shiv then saw her father pat her husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) on the shoulder, it became clear that she had been betrayed by the one person she trusted. The last shot was of Shiv looking broken before she gathered herself.
‘Sarah has this wonderful gift of keeping a tight lid on the volcanic emotions underneath,’ says Macfadyen, ‘so to watch her trying to keep that lid on is riveting… I think especially brilliantly when she sees Tom and Logan briefly connect at the end of the last episode. Sarah’s face is a mask of shock, nausea, terrible rage and the effort of controlling it all.’
‘Sarah is highly, highly virtuosic,’ says Succession writer Lucy Prebble (the British co-creator of I Hate Suzie and other great things). ‘She’s the kind of actor who can do anything… You never have to hit the narrative too much because you know she can do it with her face.’
So that’s where we are. And Snook is not going to tell me any spoilers, except that the Roy family dynamic has completely changed.
Over the course of five years we have watched Shiv blossom from her first incarnation as a straggly haired, seemingly reasonable Democrat – who was essentially detached from her father’s empire – into a sibling who is as grasping and treacherous as her brothers. Shiv is short for Siobhan – but also a slang term for a knife, usually a switchblade.
Snook laughs. ‘I think people find something empowering about her being such a bitch – well, she’s not a bitch, but… she is a bitch. They find her seeming lack of empathy and the way she’s pursuing her dreams quite empowering. I like that about Shiv. She’s complex because she’s human, not because she’s a woman.’
Though she is inevitably judged more harshly because of that. ‘You have a toddler with a hard-on for chief operating officer [her brattish brother Roman, played by Kieran Culkin] and I’m going through a management training programme?’ Shiv says to her father in season two, after he suggests she needs years of coaching before taking over.
‘You’re a young woman with no experience,’ he hisses back at her.
‘A woman. That’s a minus.’
‘Well of course it’s a f—king minus,’ he replies. ‘I didn’t make the world.’