When it comes to her character’s machinations on “Succession,” Sarah Snook felt that her favorite bit of scheming didn’t come from something directly involved with the family company. In our exclusive interview (watch the video above), she reveals, “I loved the running around behind Tom’s back with Nate,” which she thinks of as being fun but also something that made her character of Siobhan feel very masculine.

When it comes to how Siobhan (or “Shiv”) schemes with regard to her family, she views it more through the lens of learning from the mistakes of others. Snook adds, “She knows herself pretty well but is also quite blind to her flaws. But I think she’s also someone who has grown up with three older brothers making steps and missteps ahead of her and making sure she doesn’t make those same mistakes… I feel like she’s doing a lot more scheming in Season 2, to be honest!”

“Succession,” which airs on HBO, centers around the Roy family. The family patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) has built a media empire and seemed to be planning to retire and leave the company to one of his adult children: Kendall (Jeremy Strong), who is sensitive and demon-ridden; Roman (Kieran Culkin), whose behavior is brash and abhorrent; and Siobhan (Snook), the political operative who gladly irritates Logan with her choice of candidates to work for. When Logan suddenly decides to stay on as head of the company, each of the children find themselves being put through challenges to see who is worthy of taking over the company.

The centerpiece of her character is her very complicated relationship with her husband Tom (Matthew MacFadyen), who works for the Roy empire. Snook says the chemistry that developed between them “weirdly, just kind of happened. Matthew is such a lovely, charming and genuinely good human being that it’s very hard not to get along with him.” When it comes to how these two seemingly mismatched characters are with each other, Snook acknowledges that their relationship is kind of inexplicable but also views it as a strong one and believes that Siobhan does love Tom. “I think she knows he can be a bit of an asshole sometimes and a bully but I think she likes that. He’s probably the person she can be the most vulnerable with because he probably will never leave her. He’s the most stable thing in her life.”

Snook is campaigning in the Drama Actress category at the Emmys and other competitions and she’s pretty certain she knows which episode she would submit if she were to get nominated: “I would say the last episode of the season where everything melts down for Shiv.” She elaborates that she felt Siobhan really came into her own in the season finale and that the scenes she did with MacFadyen for that episode really resonated with her. She recently re-watched the episode and was struck by the how her and MacFadyen played off each other, especially in the scene where she reveals that she’s been fooling around on him.

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