Sarah Goldberg is not the person she plays on TV. But when your first marquee screen role comes as an upstart actor in the cast of HBO's Barry… things can get confusing. Luckily, that sort of mix-up doesn’t bother the 33-year-old. To the contrary, she welcomes it. “That's my fucking job,” Goldberg says in a recent phone interview. “My job is to make her feel real.”

She’s talking about Sally Reed, the love interest of Bill Hader’s hitman Barry Berkman on the HBO series. And Sally indeed feels just that: real. Actually, it’s borderline miraculous how real Sally feels given that, on the page, she’s essentially an amalgam of aspiring actress clichés. Sally is vain, superficial, hungry for fame. Plus, for good measure, she’s blonde and a little ditzy. You’d roll your eyes if you didn’t feel like you knew her from somewhere.

View more

But that’s the magic of Goldberg’s performance. She manages to at once play Sally as a big, satirical cartoon and as a familiar figure. It’s largely a thankless job. The realness with which Goldberg inhabits the offputting Hollywood tropes has, predictably, made her—rather than the multiple male killers—the villain in many viewers’ eyes. But for Goldberg, it’s also a fulfilling job—one that allows her to be complicated, flex lots of muscles, and bask in the warm glow that is Henry Winkler. And with the return of an ominous figure from Sally’s past, the past two episodes of the show have seen Goldberg unravel new layers of Sally.

GQ: Barry's not filming right now. So what are you up to?

Sarah Goldberg: I've been writing. I have a friend in London, and we've been writing partners for the last couple of years. So I just went over there for a month and we got some work done.

And tonight I'm going to do this strange show called NASSIM . It's a play, and I know nothing about it, which is part of the point. If I knew about it I wouldn't be allowed to do it. But this Iranian guy [Nassim Soleimanpour] wrote this show where basically every night there's a different guest actor, and you show up an hour before and get an envelope.

Are you nervous?

I'm actually so nervous. It's kind of like an actor's nightmare. It's designed like the bad dream you have where you're backstage and you can't find your script and you don't know any of your lines and you're maybe not dressed. But I've spoken to a bunch of actors who have done it, and all of them have said it's like a warm hug. I'm told it's not improvised. The only other thing I'm told is that you can't be allergic to tomatoes. That kind of piqued my curiosity.

Maybe you'll get pizza! Can I ask what you're writing?

It's a pilot and it's set in Ireland. It has to do with a woman who finds out that her father wasn't really her father, so she goes to track down her biological father in Ireland, only to find out she has a half-sister. And it's about their relationship. It's kind of about adult children of alcoholics and how your parents fuck you up in your thirties.

In Barry, your character writes a similarly traumatic story. Does your process resemble Sally's at all?

No, not at all. [Laughs.] Bless Sally, bless her heart. Poor girl. I think that Sally has been through such extreme trauma and she's walking up the wrong mountain, looking in the wrong places to heal that trauma. Gene [her acting teacher played by Henry Winkler] is not a licensed therapist. And I think she's really looking to her work for catharsis, and I've always tried to have a healthy removal from that. I have an actual therapist, which I find much more helpful. I've always felt like acting and writing for me is about empathy and I'm much more curious about other people's stories.

Were there particular people you knew that you were drawing from in building Sally?

There's people I certainly can't name. But I feel like I've met that girl in a bar in L.A., I've met her at a party in L.A. And there's people I know who I went to acting classes with as a teenager who were like Sally. I think there are people who come to acting looking to heal, and there is this thing of competitive grief, which we reference in the show, that happens in acting classes. People come into these situations and there's this dangerous idea that the more you've been through and the deeper and darker you are, the better artist and actor you are.

You're never going to fully detach from your own personal experience, but I think drawing those lines has always been important for me just to make it a sustainable job. If you're doing a play you've got to do it eight times a week. I did Look Back in Anger [in New York] a few years ago with Adam Driver and Matthew Rhys, and it's such a heavy play. In the final scene, my character comes back after having a miscarriage, and I had to cry every show. If you're going into your own life eight times a week and not being paid enough to pay your rent, it's not really worth the cost of your mental health. [Laughs.] So I used to just tell myself a story about a woman who got on a train and she had just had a miscarriage. This other woman passes her her baby so she could put her luggage up, and she says, "Here, can you hold this for a second." It was just a simple visual, but it gave me an entry point into what this woman's gone through where it felt safely distant from my own life.

Stephanie Diani

I've heard certain directors talk about how they want their actors to have secrets about their characters, things that don't appear on screen or that the director doesn't even know. Do you have any secrets about Sally?

Sally just wears her heart on her sleeve, so I don't think she has any secrets. No, she does. She has a big secret that's come out this season.

But no. I have stories for my backstory, but I usually share them with Bill and Alec because we're all kind of building it together. One thing I like about the way they write is they don't close any doors. If there's a bit of information that you don't need about someone, they wouldn't drop it in so that we have somewhere to go. So, for example, they wouldn't have Sally, in Season 1, say "My mother's dead," because then her mother's dead and there's no room for her mother. They leave things open until they know they want to go somewhere.

I know that you’ve experienced a bit of this perverse thing that happens where people look past the male protagonist who literally kills people and get mad that the girlfriend is “unlikable.” Is that something you were prepared for?

Totally prepared. Absolutely expecting it. And I begged Bill and Alec, "Please don't dilute her." If they had written the sweet girl next door, I would never have wanted the part. But I think unlikable is totally reductive. She's complicated, she's a person. She's not a bad person, she just learned the wrong set of survival skills. Our acceptance of violence in this society is astounding to me. With the exception of Gene, all of the male characters are killers. And nobody seems uncomfortable with that. But with Sally, we seem so uncomfortable with her ambition, her drive, the way she talks about herself. I think if that was a male character, we would never think about it or question it.

But with Sally, I also think it's because these flaws are so close. Sally is a lot more like all of us. We all have our moments of jealousy and narcissism, where we're not all mass murderers. I think the violence of these people feels quite removed, where her flaws are a lot more everyday. She's the person in your office you don't like or, more interestingly, she has the qualities you don't necessarily like in yourself.

You're working with Bill Hader and Henry Winkler, who are both comedic legends. I'm curious what you've learned from them.

I remember from my callback, I was in L.A., and the casting director was like, "Bill Hader wants to meet you before you leave town." I was so excited and I thought it was just another tape that was going to go into the vortex. But he called me and was like, "How would you feel about coming in tomorrow and improvising with me?" And I was like, "Not good. Really really not good... Obviously I'll do it." [Laughs.] He was very sweet. He said, "You don't have to be funny. We're just kind of workshopping the character. So I'll give you three scenarios, and just have a point of view for each scenario." I went in and we ended up improvising for an hour, and we had the best time. I was laughing so hard I peed myself. And it felt like a rehearsal, like workshopping the character. Bill's not someone who comes in with it solved. So I think what I learned from him is kind of just loosening up. In theater, you go in with quite a fixed performance. And so I sort of approached television in a similar way. Bill makes everyone laugh, and he makes everyone buoyant on set. And suddenly in Season 2, I feel a lot more able to improvise on the day, a lot more open, a lot looser. And I've been able to bring that to other stuff.

And with Henry, I've just learned a lot about attitude and humility. That man comes to set every day like it is his first day of work on his very first job. He has the enthusiasm and generosity of a 21 year-old fresh out of drama school. He's so kind, and it's infectious.

I hear he brings babka.

He does! One day I got to set and he had Zabar's shipped from New York to L.A. It doesn't matter how much free cake there is from catering, Henry Winkler on a Friday is bringing more. He's truly special. He's like the mayor of the world.

The other person behind the scenes is Alec Berg. He's made some of the most massive comedies over the past few decades, but a lot of people aren't that familiar with him. Do you have an Alec Berg story that sums up Alec Berg?

Oh my god! He'll be so upset with me. But Alec Berg, I think, is maybe the greatest working genius in the business. He has precision like no one I've ever worked with. You're doing a scene and you've done it a million times and you're like, "We've got this in the bag." And then he comes over so humble and quiet and he says, "I love what you're doing, but why don't you try this?" And he'll give you one tiny note that changes the whole story. Bill told me once that he thinks Alec is so smart he has to dumb himself down at least 30% on a regular basis just so that he can converse with ordinary humans.

One story, though. Alec's quite a humble guy, and he's seemingly very serious, but he has a great sense of humor. But we were driving to Big Bear, [he and myself and Bill Hader], in Season 1, and we're all a bit tired, having coffee, sharing croissants. And as we slowly go up the mountain, Alec starts getting more and more bubbly and more and more talkative, and telling us all these Seinfeld anecdotes. He's almost to the point of giggling. We had this joke that it's the altitude. So now we have this thing, we call him "Mountain Al." When Mountain Al comes out, it's when Alec Berg's silly side comes out. He's always there, Mountain Al.

As someone who started in theater, how have you felt about on-screen work as you’ve done more of it?

I find more and more, I'm really loving doing camera work. Theater is the last place we all go and turn off our phones—if you're a good person—and sit in the dark and there's this exchange going on. There's a complicity to everyone in the room, there's like a collective breath. And you can't trade that for anything. But I also feel like all the best writing right now is in television. The stories that are really interesting that are subversive are happening on TV.