Every actor has an audition horror story, even the A-listers who star in your favorite films and TV shows. For years, Backstage has collected the best of the worst from today’s top performers. To make you feel a little less alone on your own journey to stardom, let’s look back at some iconic tales of in-the-room disasters, self-tape trip-ups, and chemistry reads gone wrong. Today’s callback: Sarah Snook.
Long before Emmy winner Sarah Snook was commanding boardrooms as the ruthlessly calculated Shiv Roy on HBO’s “Succession,” she was an early career actor facing something even more daunting than drinking the Roy trio’s nauseating “Meal Fit for a King”: filming her first self-taped audition.
“This sucks. This absolutely blows,” Snook recalls, while reliving her first self-taping experience the year after graduating from Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. “Now I have to be conscious of myself? Now if I look at myself on tape and see all my flaws and mistakes? Oh, you’re the worst actor ever, Sarah.”
But one particular self-tape would prove even more mortifying than the usual fare of technical mishaps and performance anxieties. Snook forgot to cut out what she calls the “private stuff” between takes—those unguarded moments never intended for anyone else’s eyes—before sending it off. The next day, an email from her agent arrived: “Hi, Sarah. Just checking—you edited this, right?”
“As I pressed play, I just knew that I’d done something wrong,” Snook says. “[My] stomach fell out of my body. I marched up and down the house going, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no….’ So I emailed and said, ‘I think I may have sent the wrong one! Here’s the right one; please disregard the previous.’ ”
Today, Snook has grown to embrace her audition anxiety. “You’re afraid of revealing yourself? You’re meant to as an actor,” she says. “It’s like, OK, well, it’s not as if no one else can see that when you’re performing. That’s kind of the point.”
