‘Succession’: Sarah Snook Believes Shiv Loves Tom, but Won’t ‘Relinquish Herself’
Succession is hardly a romantic show. Some of the relationships have lasted for three seasons, going into Succession Season 4, but they’re not exactly harmonious. On Succession, Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen)‘s marriage is volatile. Snook has previously admitted confusion over Shiv’s true feelings for Tom, and she expanded on them in a recent interview.
Snook was a guest on Entertainment Weekly’s The Awardist podcast on Aug. 2 discussing her and the show’s latest Emmy nominations. When the subject of Shiv and Tom came up, Snook offered her own theories. Succession Season 4 is now in production.
The reason Shiv won’t ‘relinquish into’ her marriage with Tom
Marrying Shiv brought Tom into the Roy family saga, but it comes at a price. Even Tom sometimes feels vulnerable when Shiv doesn’t reciprocate his emotions.
“That’s one of the questions I get asked a lot, whether Shiv loves Tom or what’s going on there,” Snook said on The Awardist. “I think she does but it’s the thing that she can’t possibly relinquish into. That is the barrier to and the thing that probably Tom finds interesting and fascinating and maybe loves her for as well. She really struggles to be vulnerable but it is there.”
Love is a fraught thing on ‘Succession’, Sarah Snook says
Snook explains Shiv’s inability to emotionally commit via the family she grew up in. Brian Cox says Logan Roy definitely does love his children, but the fact that his children can question it would be troubling to Shiv.
“It’s the same for Logan,” Snook said. “Brian always says, ‘Oh, he loves his children.’ Does he? He truly believes that. I think Shiv is similar, having grown up in a household that it is a question whether he loves his children. That shouldn’t be a question in a household, in a family at all. I think she has grown up finding expressions of love difficult to deal with and found ways to get around them and ways to compartmentalize, ways to not have to be vulnerable and avoid all those.”
Tom can’t even take Shiv at her word on Succession. She’ll sweet talk in bed but then rescind it.
I think the worst thing she says in the scene after, she says after all of that, ‘Oh, you can’t blame me for things that were said in the bedroom’ after saying we can talk freely. Then goes on to say I may not love you but I do love you. Well, which is it? Which for me was one of the hardest lines to play. It is Jesse, Mark, which one is it? Is it she does or doesn’t? I think it’s both. I think she has such an inability to deal with what vulnerability means to be in love. To be in a position or space of weakness, inverted comments or vulnerability and rawness, then can’t give him up either. Does need him, does love him.
Sarah Snook, The Awardist, 8/2/22
The worst ‘Succession’ scene for Shiv and Tom according to Sarah Snook
“I may not love you but I do love you” may have been Shiv’s most shocking comment in Succession Season 3. Snook was most apprehensive about something Tom said to Shiv in season 2.
“One that I had the most dread about but also illuminated their relationship to me most was actually in season 2 where they’re on the beach,” Snook said. “He says that really simple line of maybe the pain I feel when I’m with you will be more than the pain I would feel without you. That I think is the confrontation of knowing he could leave is too much. I think that’s when I realized oh, Shiv needs him and loves him in her way. It’s not the classic rom-com way but in her way, she does.”
