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For an actor, every role requires an act of imagining. But for Sarah Snook, playing a woman whose five-year-old goes missing after a playdate sent her to places no new(ish) mother really wants to go.
“It’s every parent’s worst nightmare,” she says as we chat on the set of All Her Fault, an eight-part domestic thriller set in Chicago and filmed in Melbourne.
She’s loving shooting in her adopted hometown (she grew up in Adelaide, but relocated here a decade ago), and getting to sleep in her own bed at night, not least because it means she can see her daughter – 18 months old when we chat in November 2024 – when she gets home.
And she feels having a child has added enormously to how she’s approached the project, on which she is star and executive producer.
Jake Lacy as Peter and Sarah Snook as Marissa in All Her Fault.
“I don’t think I would have been able to do this role before now,” she says. “I would have been able to imaginatively create something, but there’s a real difference between that and the depth of feeling that I now understand. There’s a wealth of emotion to draw on.”
She’s played a mother before, in Beautiful Lie, in which her character abandoned her son to be with the man she loved. But she didn’t have a child then, and it coloured the way she approached it.
“I stand by the choices I made as an actor,” she says of that performance. “But there were parents who would go, ‘I don’t know how she would leave her son’. And I, as the actor, was going, ‘She’s in love with this guy, of course she would’. But had I been a parent at that time, I would probably have made different choices, with a different kind of depth.”
Kartiah Vergara as Ana, Duke McCloud as Milo and Sophia Lillis as Carrie.Credit: Sarah Enticknap/PEACOCK
All Her Fault is adapted from the 2021 novel by Irish writer Andrea Mara (who claims the inciting premise was drawn from her life – she, too, turned up to collect her child from a playdate only to find her daughter was not there). But in bringing it to the screen, writer Megan Gallagher and the production team at UK company Carnival have sought to open it up, and expand its scope beyond its genre confines.
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“It isn’t your average TV domestic thriller,” says Minkie Spiro, the English-born, Sydney-based director of the first four episodes (Australian Kate Dennis, Emmy nominated for The Handmaid’s Tale, directs the second block of four).
Executive producer Nigel Marchant, whose credits include Downton Abbey and The Day of the Jackal, says they wanted “to open [the story] out a lot more because a lot of the novel is set around a kitchen table”. The question they set themselves, he adds, was, “How do we make it much more visually interesting for an audience?”
Part of the answer was to relocate the drama from suburban Dublin to the hustle and bustle of Chicago – albeit the ritzy enclave of Wilmette, a picturesque and prosperous village on the shore of Lake Michigan, north of the city proper. Melbourne’s mix of modern and period architecture made it a near-perfect double, and the enormous LED volume at Docklands Studios allowed footage shot in Chicago to be seamlessly integrated (all those luscious views of the lake, for instance, are projections, with the house an enormous set built on one of the studio’s larger sound stages).
The novel’s story is largely confined to the home. But, says Spiro, “we wanted to make it much more expansive, to make the world feel a lot bigger, so that when Milo is abducted it’s like a needle in a haystack. How are you going to find him?”
Sarah Snook as Marissa, Michael Pena as Detective Alcaras, and Jake Lacy as Peter (background).Credit: Sarah Enticknap/PEACOCK
Plenty of action and intrigue unfolds within the home Marissa shares with her husband, Peter (Jake Lacy). But there’s a world outside, too: the school; the lake; the city where wealth adviser Marissa and her commodities trader husband earn their very handsome living; the mysterious world of the minimum-wage nannies and their young charges – a world that’s a total mystery to their well-heeled employers; and the underbelly into which the frantic parents are inevitably drawn as the police hunt, led by detective Alcaras (Michael Pena), fails to yield results.
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“It’s like an accordion, this show,” says Spiro. “You have the expanse, and then you go into these very intense moments, and then you’re out again.”
At the core of the story is a family under siege. And in that, says Lacy, it owes something to the domestic thrillers of the 1980s and ’90s, of which Fatal Attraction was the example par excellence.
“It’s kind of a sexy, dark, family thriller thing that they don’t really make any more,” he says. “It’s of the moment in a lot of ways, but the genre, I think, harks back much more to these fun ’90s films in the writing.”
Around the parents at the height of the drama there’s a swirl of other characters, many offering support, but any of whom could be a suspect. Ana (Kartia Vergara) and Carrie (Sophia Lillis) are a couple of nannies who become friends at the park where their charges play after school. Jenny (Dakota Fanning) is a mother and marketing executive in publishing whose teacher husband Richie (Thomas Cocquerel) makes all the right noises about balancing work and home but does nothing of substance to support that. Colin (Jay Ellis), Marissa’s business partner, and Lia (Abby Elliott), Peter’s sister, seem to be harbouring shared secrets; even the disabled Brian (Daniel Monks), who is housed and employed by his brother Peter, could have a motive for being involved in the kidnapping. It’s a veritable rogues gallery – of ostensibly nice people.
Supporters or suspects?: Daniel Monks (left) as Brian, Abby Elliott as Lia and Jay Ellis as Colin.
“I truly think this is a character piece in the skin of a thriller,” observes Spiro. “What’s so brilliant is that Megan has navigated this propulsive thriller while also giving quite important social commentary about what is going on in this world, what it’s like to parent in the 21st century, the difference between men and women, primary care versus secondary care in terms of parenting.”
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First and foremost, it is a “great thriller”, says Marchant. But beyond that, “it’s got something to say.
“It talks about the inequality of domestic labour in many heterosexual relationships, how the balance can often be very much weighted on a woman,” says Marchant. “And also at times there is trial by media on women – it’s called All Her Fault for a reason. And it’s not just about one of the female characters, it’s about us forming very quick decisions about people, and how the media can manipulate that.”
For Snook, the broader social commentary was something that appealed. “In most households, the women doing full-time work tend to also pick up the majority of the household work and domestic chores and parenting and family life, the logistics, the scheduling – the mental load of that tends to fall to the female partner in the marriage. And I think it should be equal.”
She’s not pointing the finger at her situation, she hastens to add. She’s married to Dave Lawson, a fellow actor (they met on the set of Oddball in 2015, much of which was shot where we’re talking today, at Docklands Studios Melbourne), and as her career has soared – this year she won the Tony award for best actress in a play for the Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Gray – he’s taken on the lion’s share of the domestic work, especially since the birth of their child.
Which brings us back to the new-found resonance of this story for her, and the challenges of tackling material that no longer feels purely abstract.
“I don’t know what motivated me to decide to do a job in which I am crying, it turns out, in every scene,” she says, without much exaggeration at all (she really is crying in almost every scene).
“I think just the challenge of something different was the thing that really drew me initially, going to something that is dark, mysterious. I’ve never done genre thrillers in that way, dealing with themes that five-years-ago Sarah wouldn’t have been able to really do or do justice to. So, yeah, I think the challenge of it was what drew me to this.”
All Her Fault streams on Foxtel/Binge from November 7.
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