Succession's Sarah Snook Says That Season 4 Game Changer Was Dropped on the Cast Like a 'Grenade'

The following contains spoilers from the April 9 episode of HBO’s Succession.

What Succession star Sarah Snook thought was going to be yet another meeting about on-set COVID protocols turned out to be something very different.

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Speaking with our sister site Rolling Stone about the final season’s third episode (of 10) — in which business tycoon and family patriarch Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) tragically keeled over during a flight to Sweden — Shiv’s portrayer recalled, “There was a Zoom meeting early on in the season that I thought was going to be more of the COVID protocols, and then turned out to be more of a grenade lobbed in of revelation,” that Logan would die early into the season. (Read our full recap.)

Snook said that her own reaction upon processing the news was one of “Whoa! That’s a huge swing.” Though, “In some ways, it was a long time coming,” she noted. (As diehard fans of the series likely are aware, Logan was originally intended to die at the end of Season 1.) “There’s always been an ailing quality to him, despite his robust vigor.”

Recalling the cast’s group text at the time that Said “grenade” got dropped, Snook told Rolling Stone there was “a lot of, ‘Whoa, what’s gonna happen? What’s this season going to look like? … Do we just stop after four episodes? How do we proceed? The king is gone.'”

Snook confirmed that the last scene that she filmed with Cox was the one from was last week, at the karaoke club. And though she, Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin and Alan Ruck knew it was the last, “Strangely, it felt just like any other day,” she said.

“You can’t get … indulge any feelings outside of what the characters are feeling. It would get messy,” she explained. “It wasn’t until maybe the second-to-last take, it may have been Kieran who went, ‘This is our last take with Brian.” I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ We’ve been doing this for so long… that it doesn’t feel real to be saying goodbye at all.”

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