[This story contains spoilers for Succession season four, episode four, “Honeymoon States.”]
As was expected, the episode of Succession that followed the death of Logan Roy had a lot of moving parts. But amid the game of Waystar Royco successor chess being played by all of the main characters in the HBO media family saga came a subtle reveal: Shiv Roy is pregnant.
Sarah Snook unpacked the big development for her character when visiting HBO’s Succession podcast, explaining why Shiv chose to not share the news with her brothers and husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), the latter being the likely father despite their premiere decision to divorce.
Shiv getting pregnant was “always something Jesse had discussed in the writers room,” Snook told journalist and host Kara Swisher about creator Jesse Armstrong’s plans for her character. The reveal, meanwhile, arrives as Snook is pregnant herself, and expecting her first child with husband Dave Lawson.
Delivering this storyline in the fourth and final season, just as the Succession stakes have been raised following the death of her father, media titan Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox), provided meaty material for Snook to dig into with the character she has played for four Emmy-winning and beloved seasons.
“Shiv has some pretty complicated feelings about becoming a mother,” said Snook, explaining Shiv’s muted reaction to the good news from her doctor who called with the amniocentesis results. “She’s in some ways feigning indifference, because it’s one of those things that’s almost too hard to face, and she doesn’t like dealing with emotions. It’s easier to repress things. There’s a competitiveness against her feelings with her own mother and her desire to better her own mother’s maternal qualities, but a fear that she probably won’t be able to do that. A fear and a frustration that all the things she’s working toward and aiming toward, she may not now be able to achieve because she will be a mother as well as a businesswoman and, how do these two things coalesce in her life? She hasn’t really considered that as a path for her life and so it’s quite a shock.”
Snook added that for Shiv, “in a way, it would have been easier if there was something wrong so that she could have a reason to terminate and not feel guilt. But with nothing wrong, there’s no reason to not continue.”
The Roy siblings (Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin) in “Honeymoon States,” written by creator Jesse Armstrong and directed by Lorene Scafaria
HBO
Shiv keeps the big news to herself as the episode plays out, with the fourth episode of the final season, “Honeymoon States,” taking place in Logan’s apartment during a memorial for the departed CEO. After a discovery that Logan at some point, perhaps four years ago, wrote down his wishes that son Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) should be his successor, the Roy siblings who were united an episode prior when grieving their father’s untimely death at Connor’s wedding begin to splinter.
Ultimately — after some debate about whether or not Kendall’s name was underlined or crossed out — Kendall and Roman (Kieran Culkin) team up to be interim co-CEOs, leaving Shiv iced out. Kendall and Roman assure Shiv she will remain a key decision-maker, but Kendall ends the episode by going behind everyone’s back to approve the launch of a smear campaign against Logan in order to better Waystar Royco’s reputation in the media.
Snook describes Logan’s decision to name Kendall as his successor to be a “message from the grave.” She said, “What were my father’s dying wishes? And I never got to hear them, it’s talking into the vacuum on the phone [when he died]. And then seeing scribbled pieces of paper and still not even mentioned. Still not even an afterthought. The only afterthought, really, is Kendall.”
Shiv is faced with the dilemma of having no confidante for her personal news, and that includes Tom, even though she does show a moment of vulnerability with her estranged husband when she talks about grieving her father. “She doesn’t have many places to turn,” Snook said. “It’s too complicated [to tell Tom about the pregnancy], I think. It changes too much. There’s too much going on … Her father just died. There’s so many business machinations happening, to then bring Tom into it in a familial sense would confuse it again. She doesn’t know how she feels about it herself. In a way, I think she would prefer to decide what her own feelings are about this before she has Tom’s feelings muddy the waters.”
What she’s contemplating, says Snook, is: “In what way is this going to hold me back, not propel me forward? … Women are extraordinary, and yet those are the very things we use to yeah, hold them back. It’s wild.”
Snook said that she learned of Logan’s death at the beginning of the season, but they didn’t know the details until receiving the script for “Connor’s Wedding.” The detachment and denial that they all felt when learning about his death will propel the final season forward for the Roy children, said Snook.
“She’s someone who was afraid of vulnerability and taught to be afraid of vulnerability, so coming into this scene, this is going to be the most exposing time for her,” she said of Shiv’s final phone call goodbye to Logan, who may or may not have heard the message. “The stakes are so high with the prospect of her father dying, not being able to be there, having to communicate that she does love him. But also, what is the honest truth in this moment is that her love is very complex and fraught with a kind of loathing and a self-loathing as well for feeling those feelings, and a frustration. All of that is there in the writing.”
She added, “Saying ‘I love you, Dad’ at any other point in life, even at the time of his death, you would get a silence perhaps back. So the time that you want it to be answered the most, you’re still getting silence. There’s never a satisfaction there.”
Ultimately, no matter how Shiv ends up dealing with her personal life (“Maybe it’s beyond the end of season four that she grows and changes,” she shared), Snook is confident about not counting Shiv the businesswoman out just yet: “I think she is a killer long-term. I feel like she’s the most like Logan so she in the end, inevitably, will end up to be a killer. Maybe more than Kendall is.”
Succession releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max. Read THR’s finale season coverage.
