‘I couldn’t have done role this five years ago’

For an actor, every role requires an act of imagination. But for Sarah Snook, playing a woman whose five-year-old goes missing after a play date sent her to places no new(ish) mom really wants to go.

“This is every parent’s worst nightmare,” he says as we chat on set. It’s All His FaultAn eight-part domestic thriller set in Chicago and shot in Melbourne.

She loves filming in her adopted hometown (she grew up in Adelaide but moved here a decade ago) and sleeping in her own bed at night, especially because it means she can see her daughter, who was 18 months old when we chat in November 2024, when she returns home.

And she feels that having children has greatly contributed to her approach to the project on which she stars and executive produces.

“I don’t think I could have played this role before,” he says. “I could create things with my imagination, but there’s a real difference between that and the depth of emotion that I understand now. There’s so much emotion to create.”

She has played a mother before. beautiful lieHer character abandoned her son to be with the man she loved. But he had no children at the time, and that colored his approach to it.

Regarding this performance, he says, “I stand by the choices I made as an actor.” “But there were parents who said, ‘I don’t know how to let go of their son.’ And as an actor, I was saying, ‘She’s in love with this guy, of course she would be in love. But if I had been a parent at that time, I probably would have made different choices with a different depth.’

It’s All His Fault It’s adapted from the 2021 novel by Irish author Andrea Mara (who claims the provocative premise was drawn from her own life – so she arrived to pick up her child from a playdate, only to realize her daughter wasn’t there). But in bringing the film to the big screen, writer Megan Gallagher and the production team at UK company Carnival sought to expand the subject and expand its scope beyond genre boundaries.

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“This isn’t your average domestic thriller on TV,” says Minkie Spiro, the Sydney-based British-born director of the first four episodes (Australian Kate Dennis was nominated for an Emmy). The Handmaid’s Taledirects the second block of four).

Executive producer Nigel Marchant, whose projects include: Downton Abbey And Jackal Daysays they want to open [the story] It comes out a lot more because so much of the novel takes place around the kitchen table.” He adds that the question they asked themselves was: “How can we make it more visually interesting for the audience?”

Part of the answer was to move the drama from suburban Dublin to the hustle and bustle of Chicago—albeit in the upscale enclave of Wilmette, a picturesque and prosperous village just north of the city on the shores of Lake Michigan. Melbourne’s mix of modern and period architecture made it a near-perfect duo, and the massive LED soundstage at Docklands Studios allowed footage shot in Chicago to be seamlessly integrated (all those luscious views of the lake, for example, are projections, with a massive set built atop one of the studio’s larger soundstages).

The story of the novel is largely confined to the home. But Spiro says: “We wanted to make it a lot more expansive, to make the world feel a lot bigger, so when Milo gets kidnapped it’s like a needle in a haystack. How are you going to find him?”

There’s a lot of action and intrigue going on in the home Marissa shares with her husband Peter (Jake Lacy). But there is a world outside too: school; goal; The city where wealth advisor Marissa and her commodity trader husband make a very good living; the mysterious world of minimum-wage nannies and their young attendants – a world that is a complete mystery to their wealthy employers; The police hunt, led by Detective Alcaras (Michael Pena), ensures that the evil situation into which the crazy parents are inevitably dragged is aborted.

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“This show is like an accordion,” Spiro says. “You have a wide space and then you go into these very intense moments and then you come out again.”

At the center of the story is a family under siege. Lacy says that he also owes this to the domestic thrillers of the 1980s and 90s. Fatal Attraction It was a perfect example.

“It’s a sexy, dark family thriller that they don’t make anymore,” he says. “It’s contemporary in a lot of ways, but I think the genre is more reminiscent of these fun ’90s movies that are being written.”

At the height of the drama, there is a maelstrom of other characters around the parents, most of whom offer support, but any of whom might be suspicious. Ana (Kartia Vergara) and Carrie (Sophia Lillis) are a couple of nannies who become friends at the park where their friends play after school. Jenny (Dakota Fanning) is a mom and marketing executive in the publishing industry whose teacher husband Richie (Thomas Cocquerel) makes all the right noises about balancing work and home but doesn’t do anything significant to back it up. Marissa’s business partner Colin (Jay Ellis) and Peter’s sister Lia (Abby Elliott) appear to share secrets; Even disabled Brian (Daniel Monks), housed and employed by his brother Peter, may have a reason to be involved in the kidnapping. A veritable rogues gallery of seemingly good people.

“I really think this is a character piece disguised as a thriller,” Spiro says. “The great thing is that Megan directs this propulsive thriller while also making some pretty important social commentary about what’s going on in this world, what it’s like to be a parent in the 21st century, the differences between men and women, the differences between primary care and secondary care in terms of parenting.”

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First of all, it’s a “great thriller,” says Marchant. But beyond that “he has something to say.

“It talks about the inequality of domestic labor in many heterosexual relationships, how the balance often falls very heavily on one woman,” Marchant says. “Also, from time to time, women are judged by the media – that’s what they call It’s All His Fault for some reason. “And it’s not just about one of the female characters, it’s about the way we make very quick decisions about people and how the media can manipulate that.”

For Snook, the broader social commentary was interesting. “In most households, women who work full-time also tend to take on much of the housework, chores, parenting and family life, logistics and planning, the mental burden of which tends to fall on the female partner in the marriage. And I think that should be equal.”

He doesn’t point fingers at his situation, he hastens to add. he is married Dave Lawsonan actor friend (they met on the set) Strange In 2015, much of it was filmed at Docklands Studios Melbourne, where we’re talking today), and as her career took off, she won the Tony for best actress in a play for the Broadway production this year. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Especially since birth, she undertakes the lion’s share of the housework their child.

Which brings us back to the newfound resonance of this story itself, and the challenges of dealing with material that no longer feels completely abstract.

“I don’t know what motivated me to decide to do a job where I cry, it shows up in every scene,” he says, without any exaggeration (he actually cries in almost every scene).

“I think what really drew me to it in the beginning was the challenge of something different, to go for something dark, mysterious. Five years ago I’d never done genre thrillers like this, dealing with themes that Sarah couldn’t really do or do justice to. So, yeah, I think that challenge is what drew me to it.”

It’s All His Fault It will air on Foxtel/Binge from 7 November.

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