At an early screening of Barry, the hit HBO show that casts Bill Hader as a hitman turned improv actor, a man in the audience raised his hand to offer some constructive feedback. He wasn't a fan of Sally Reed, one of Barry Berkman's classmates and his crush on the show. The man deemed her narcissistic and delusional. He said she wasn't "likeable."

Sarah Goldberg, who plays Sally on Barry, was prepared to seethe in silence. But just then, a writer on the show stepped in. "Barry fucking kills people," Goldberg remembers she said. "He's a murderer, and you don’t like Sally because she's self-involved."

The moment—so pointed and perfect Goldberg wishes she had it trapped in glass—is one that she's returned to over and over since Barry premiered last month. It's the "perfect distillation," a simple back-and-forth that sums up just how hard it is to depict complicated, "flawed" women on screen. Even next to a homicidal loner, somehow it's Sally who looks bad.

The fact that she repels people is the reason Goldberg wanted the role. "I knew as soon as I read the script that I hadn't seen this woman on television," she recalls. "But I felt like I knew her, like I'd met her in a bar somewhere and decided she wasn't that nice." And the more she studied her, the more she started to empathize with Sally. Like the character, she knows what it's like to feel desperate, to ache to succeed in an impossible business. "Sally is ruthless and ambitious—to her own detriment, I think, to the point that she alienates people and it's painful to watch," notes Goldberg, who is, for the record, so kind and Canadian that she pushes a literal plate of chocolate chip cookies toward me when we meet. "But at the same time, we get to see how vulnerable she is. She's exploited and rejected. I'm an actress; of course I understand that."

In the show's recent #MeToo-ish episode, which was filmed before reports from the New York Times and the New Yorker kicked off a cultural revolution a few months ago, Sally meets with a potential agent who wonders aloud whether he wants to work with her or sleep with her. The moment is awkward and painful, and in the end, Sally apologizes to him to ease his discomfort.

HBO

It's not an experience that Goldberg has had, at least not in such overt terms. But it is one of the reasons she feels fortunate to have kicked off her career in the West End and on Broadway. Theater isn't without its pitfalls, but it's more collaborative, Goldberg tells me. She felt she had more power. "The whole business, it's a strange profession because your vulnerabilities are what you have to offer," she muses. "That's where the good stuff is. But in order to survive in it, you have to have a very thick skin." She pauses, in search of the words to explain the paradox. "The minute you give up one for the other, you lose. But if you don’t have some armor, you can’t survive."

New as she is to Hollywood, Goldberg has been in its environs for enough time to know that "there's a lot of pressure to look a certain way, act a certain way, have enough Instagram followers." She's refused it all, especially social media. "I think it can be hugely distracting from what the actual thing is, what the work is about."

Her seriousness met its match in Hader, the show's co-creator and its "consummate gentleman." He gets "the Mensch Award," as she puts it. "He has no ego, and that's just unheard of for someone who is that successful and talented and that far in his career. Truly, no one has ever heard of such a concept. A man with no ego!" It wasn't just his openness to new ideas that impressed her, but his insistence that the set be a positive environment, that people laugh and have fun and support each other. "At night or between takes, Bill would perform every SNL sketch that was cut for time between 2006 and 2013," she remembers. "He would do all the voices; the one-man cut-for-time SNL extravaganza." He kept his cast mates so entertained and was so wild and exuberant that she started to refer to her job as summer camp. One night, she pulled her car over on the drive home. "I felt like I was on this natural high. I'd never been so elated at work, all the time."

The show—which also stars Henry Winkler, resplendent as Barry and Sally's maniac teacher—has not just charmed critics, but developed a cult audience. Within weeks of its premiere, Barry was renewed for a second season. It's an odd and hard-to-define series, even for prestige television, which specializes in offbeat comedies. "Is it Waiting for Guffman? Is it The Sopranos? It's its own genre," Goldberg concludes. "I look around at the world now, and I think we all need distractions: Dark or funny. Preferably both."

Mattie Kahn Mattie Kahn is a writer who lives in New York.

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