Australian actress Sarah Snook is making a name for herself giving nuanced performances in a wide variety of roles. She acted opposite Ryan Kwanten in ‘Not Suitable for Children’ in 2012, and this August has two new feature films coming out: disaster film ‘These Final Hours’ and ‘Predestination’, in which she plays the lead opposite Ethan Hawke. Sophie Joske managed to have a chat with the actress before her upcoming international stardom and adoring public make her too busy for interviews.
Snook’s turn in time-travel thriller ‘Predestination’ sees her play a character who transitions from female to male. She told us what unique challenges playing a male role presented.
“The first main challenge is the physicality, I found. Because I had to kind of make them different enough that you could see that they were different, like I could feel that they were different people in my own body. You can’t just pretend to be a man, you kind of have to be a man, which makes it really hard. But we had this crazy power netting stuff that I could put on which was like a body suit, which sucked everything in, and kinda changed my physical shape and therefore made me change how I walk. Before we started shooting I did training for one or two months to bulk up [laughs], to get a manlier physique, which definitely helped.”
The film’s tight shooting schedule meant that Snook did not have the luxury of being able to play the male and female roles one at a time. “There were two or three days where we had to do both in the same day and the makeup usually took three hours, to turn from myself into the man. And on this day we had to do it in an hour and a half, which was quite a feat, but they got it done, it was amazing!”
[Spoiler warning] The gender identity of Snook’s character is rather complex, and could be interpreted as transgender or gender fluid, identifying as female at one stage in her life and male in another. “I mean she always was both [male and female], and just didn’t realise that she was. And it was a funny kind of journey I guess to go on in terms of finding who this character was, because she does do a transition, she goes from female to male, except that she does it involuntarily. I spoke to a friend of mine who was in the process of transitioning from female to male a lot more about the physiological things that happen and the emotional, mental state and also the spiritual state, I guess, of how you feel as a person.”
Snook said she’s gotten some unexpected reactions to her performance as a male writer. “A lot of people actually have said weirdly that I look like Leonardo DiCaprio as a young man, as my male character. The amount of people who’ve said that that don’t know each other, I’m like ‘That’s just weird’. And I thought ‘Oh, maybe that’s my thing. Maybe I’ll run out of work and I’ll go play his younger self.’ Does she have any particular roles in mind? “Yep. Titanic 2: The Prequel.” She laughed.
Snook plays a rather different character in ‘These Final Hours’, which was created right here in Perth and has already been receiving international critical acclaim. “I play- someone described me yesterday as a really creepy mermaid. Which is kind of accurate when you see it.” she said. “I had an excellent time shooting that, over in Perth. My dad lives over there so he was pretty happy to have me home for a bit.”
With ‘These Final Hours’ and ‘Predestination’ hitting cinemas on the same day, Snook has achieved something of a cinema takeover. Given that she’s currently got the Australian film industry in the palm of her hand, she’s got some thoughts on the subject. “Another reason why I really like ‘Predestination’ was that it was a diverse idea for an Australian film, it wasn’t like the regular kind of urban drama. We’re feeling a little more confident to explore genre films and more internationally minded films, and our producers that we have, especially here, have been getting a lot more international experience and want to bring that kind of breadth of knowledge and design back to Australia, which is great. It helps the industry to grow.”
Sophie Joske
