Shiv's Wavering Love For Tom Was A Hard Line For Sarah Snook To Play
This article contains minor spoilers for "Succession" season 4.
Shiv and Tom's relationship has been a staple of "Succession" from the very beginning. The romance is its own microcosm of power plays in a world of 4D chess, where the only daughter of the Murdochian media empire tortures her submissive husband that transforms into a sadistic tormentor himself the second his wife turns her back. Even at the healthiest moments of their courtship, the pair have exchanged cutting barbs that masked their more heartfelt feelings for one another. At the end of season 3, their marriage reaches a turning point when Shiv delivers a line of mind-boggling ambiguity — "I may not love you, but I do love you." But does Shiv Roy really love Tom?
Vulnerability isn't exactly a regular state of mind in the Roy family. They deal mostly in insults and backstabs rather than hugs and kisses, even at their most affectionate moments. It's safe to assume that warmth was not a well-stocked item in their abundant household, and neither of Shiv's parents was particularly keen on letting their fondness for their children flow freely. The series is not shy about equating the succession of the company with Logan's approval, suggesting that he failed to demonstrate his love for his kids when they were younger.
"I think she has grown up finding expressions of love difficult to deal with," Sarah Snook explained in defense of her character to Entertainment Weekly. "And found ways to get around them and ways to compartmentalize and ways to not have to be vulnerable and avoid all those."
With Logan as an example, Shiv fails to let herself express or even fully experience the love that she has for Tom, making her true feelings almost impossible to identify — even for her. Despite all their hardship, their marriage still has a fighting chance.
'I may not love you, but I do love you'
Shiv says a lot of terrible things to Tom over the course of the series, but Snook thinks that the worst thing her character ever says to her husband is "I may not love you but I do love you." As an actress, she found this line incredibly frustrating — not to mention cruel.
"It's like, well, which is it?" the actress exclaimed. "But, for me, I think, this was one of the hardest lines to play."
Shiv's feelings are so suppressed and obfuscated that it was difficult for Snook to decode her own character's meaning at first. It seemed impossible that Shiv could say such diametrically opposed things in the same breath. On what level did she mean or not mean each of them? The actress had to parse through her psyche to figure out the answer.
"Is it she does or doesn't?" Snook asked rhetorically. "And I think it's both. I think it's, she has such an inability to deal with what vulnerability means, to be in love and to be in sort of a positional space of 'weakness' — inverted commas — vulnerability and rawness, and then can't give him up either, y'know. Like, she does need him. She does love him."
Snook often finds it difficult to deliver such horrible insults to Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Tom. She isn't afraid he'll be genuinely hurt — she just isn't sure they'll be able to get through the scene without cracking a smile. "Oftentimes, we find ourselves laughing at the end of a take because what we've said to each other is so cruel and preposterous, that you would even say that to your partner, in any circumstance, but they do," the actress told Collider.
Do Shiv and Tom love each other?
Despite saying such horrible things to him, Shiv really isn't really sure whether she loves her husband or not. Love is a foreign emotion for Shiv, but ultimately that's part of what drew Tom to her in the first place.
"I think she does [love Tom] but it's the thing that she can't possibly relinquish into," Snook said to Entertainment Weekly. "It's like, that is the barrier to — and the thing that Tom probably finds fascinating and interesting and maybe loves her for as well, in that — she really struggles to be vulnerable, but it is there."
You might be wondering how a guy like Tom managed to break through any of those highly-guarded barriers around Shiv's heart. Both characters have often referenced a meltdown in Shiv's past that happened right around the time that they got serious with one another. At Logan's wake, Tom recalls how he flew to Paris to see Shiv and coaxed her into opening up to him. In a time of crisis, Shiv was forced to be vulnerable, and Tom was there when he needed her.
Tom stands to gain a lot of wealth and status from Shiv, but his feelings for her feel very real. He is genuinely hurt by her infidelity and by her harsher words. Their feelings for each other are surprisingly real, which is what makes his betrayal in the penultimate season finale all the more shocking.
Shiv was heartbroken when Tom stabbed her in the back, but even Snook would agree that her character dealt the first blows. "I say that she was hurt by Tom, but Tom has had a death by a thousand cuts from Shiv," the actress admitted to Collider. "She's constantly just whittling him down. And then, when he turns around and, with one single blow fights back, she's suddenly surprised."
Will their marriage survive the final season?
In season 4, the tables have turned for Shiv and Tom. After years of playing dead, the boy from St. Paul finally makes a move against his wife. For the first time in their relationship, Shiv doesn't have control over her husband, and it's made her feel unsafe. She can no longer trust him to act in her interest, and now she is too scared to open up again.
"The power dynamics and the hierarchy between them have been upended," Snook explained in a behind-the-scenes look at the season 4 premiere via HBO. "In some ways she finds it attractive, standing up for yourself and like fighting back, but I think she needs Tom to be subordinate to her because it's safer that way."
She would rather suppress her feelings of betrayal than revisit the moment when Tom pulled the rug out from under her. "I think it's too sensitive for her to admit that someone played her," Snook added. "She's always trying to escape any situation that means that she has to be vulnerable."
The only way that Shiv and Tom's relationship could heal is if Shiv somehow gained the upper hand again, to feel dominant over Tom again and thus to feel safe with him. "To balance the power again, she has to feel just as powerful with something external from her father, from the family business," the actress explained.
This brings us to Norway when Shiv helps negotiate a deal that puts Tom at the helm of her late father's news network. By placing Tom back in her debt, she not only reclaims her marriage in its original shape, but she also gains a strong influence over Logan's legacy under its new ownership. With Shiv back on top and Tom back in her good graces, could their marriage come back from the dead?