Sarah Snook talks playing 27 characters in ‘Dorian Gray’

Sarah Snook, an Australian actress, is taking on an incredible feat by playing 27 different characters in the Broadway adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s A Picture Of Dorian Gray.

Reflecting on Wilde’s writing, she told CBS, "Yeah, he has a lot of pathos. I think there's a lot of empathy for the human condition – I think, you know, seeing the soul as a real thing and as a part of your body, personality, spiritual makeup that one might need to protect and look after."

She went on to win the British theater award, the Olivier for her performance in the show at West End.

Discussing the current era being right to the tell the story, the actress explained that this is a time "where we have such an image-based culture and ability to construct a visual image to sell to anyone online, on Instagram. And part of the reason of playing multiple different characters is about choosing which mask is the right mask, which is the public/private mask that we show of ourselves."

Snook is best known for her performance as Siobhan "Shiv" Roy in the HBO series, Succession, however, she didn’t always want to do the role. "Yeah, there was nothing in myself that I could see as, like, reflective or accessible in that character.”

Admitting that she has been drawn to complicated characters for a long time, she continued, "I watched a ton of Disney films when I was a kid, and all I wanted to be was Ursula and Scar, all the villains, all the people who had seeming more complexity to why they were that in the first place."

The director and adapter of Dorian Gray, Kip Williams remarked about the play, "Oscar Wilde talks about this notion that life is one grand act of theater, and that people are always in a form of performance where they are either revealing or concealing parts of themselves. So, the form of this piece – one performer playing all of these 26 characters – is an expression of that idea."

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