As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here

Sally Reed, Barry

Sarah Goldberg gets a lot of questions about how it feels to play a character who is “so unlikable.”

“I find it so funny, because it just never occurred to me,” she said to me over the phone last week. “I never read the script and thought, ‘Is she likable or dislikable?’ I just thought, ‘Oh, I know that girl.’”

In the first season of Barry, Bill Hader’s half hour about a hit man trying to become an actor, Sally was a punch line—an actor so self-absorbed she didn’t realize her boyfriend was a paid assassin. Goldberg’s references for her character were other actors she met working in Los Angeles, where she found a lot of “competitive grief”—“the bigger your trauma, the better actress you are.”

But the second season of Barry transformed Sally from a nattering, self-absorbed wannabe to a traumatized artist with surprising integrity, an indication of how much character work the show is able to squeeze out of its tight, half-hour format. In scenes opposite her ex-husband—and her onstage attempt to depict their abusive marriage—Sally’s character fleshes out almost despite herself, as a sudden spike of success and the chance to sell out turns into a pivot towards her own artistic integrity. Vanity Fair spoke to Goldberg about how she, Hader, and co-creator Alec Berg developed Sally’s changes over the course of Season 2.

How she came to life

In Season 1, what made Sally’s character so inherently comical was how naïvely she glommed onto Barry’s projected, false version of himself. “She feels that Barry thinks that she’s the greatest actress in the world. That is all Sally really needs to know from anyone,” Goldberg said, laughing.

At the same time, Sally recognizes in Barry “someone who’s hiding in the way that she’s hiding.”

“I always knew that this was a woman who was a liar,” Goldberg said—referencing a joke in the pilot, later cut, that was a dark reference to Sally’s abusive past. Her violent marriage was eventually briefly alluded to in the first season.

“This was a woman in performance of her life . . . somebody who’s come to Los Angeles totally desperate, totally lost, really needing to re-invent herself and believe this new mythology of what her life is,” continued Goldberg. Sally sees acting as a religion and a form of therapy, and she’s “going to these classes for some sort of catharsis.”

Season 2 has demonstrated how much of Sally’s “unlikability” is really the armor of a trauma survivor in deep denial. Goldberg joked that because Sally doesn’t have health care, this class is all the therapy she can afford. Early on, she said, it became apparent that Sally’s cruelty needed to be unintentional: “Any time something was written where she was purposely mean, it didn’t really work.”

“She has this complete tunnel vision. Like, ‘if I can just get here, I’m going to be O.K.’ It’s like, ‘if I can just be a famous actress, I’m going to be O.K.,’” Goldberg explained. “This is somebody who is really in pain and needs to lie, essentially, to survive.”

Sally’s history fully unfolds early in Season 2, when she attempts to dramatize the story of how she left her abusive ex-husband. At the end of Episode 3, Sam himself shows up outside class, threatening Sally. In Episode 4, after a strained dinner with Sam and Barry, Sally goes to Sam’s hotel room to talk—while Barry decides, separately, if he’ll kill Sam for threatening Sally.