How Sarah Goldberg became Barry’s ‘secret weapon’

By Annabel Ross

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There’s a scene in season three of the HBO dark comedy Barry where Sally Reed, played by Sarah Goldberg, is doing a press junket for her first TV series Joplin, loosely based on an autobiographical play she wrote about an abusive ex-partner. Ahead of Joplin’s premiere, Sally participates in the obligatory junket, where a string of clueless journalists fire off a series of inane questions. The title of the episode actually shares a name with the response given by a nonplussed Sally when asked who she thinks the next Spider-man should be. “Um, Ben Mendelsohn?”

Consequently, it feels very meta to be conducting an interview with Goldberg junket-style (albeit online, via Zoom). A gaggle of journalists including myself have been given 10-minute allotments to chat with the actor ahead of the premiere of Barry’s fourth and final season [warning: spoilers for seasons 1-3 are ahead].

“I’m not interested in seeing likeable women on television”: Sarah Goldberg as Sally Reed in Barry.Credit:HBO/Foxtel

In Barry, Sally is nervous ahead of her press junket. Goldberg, for her part, is bright and warm, in spite of the many journalists she’ll be speaking with before and after me. Four seasons in, she must be used to the attention — Barry, created by and starring Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader, is adored by critics and the devoted audience it has cultivated over the past five years, and as Barry’s neurotic girlfriend Sally, Goldberg’s wonderful, nuanced performance has seen her dubbed the show’s “secret weapon”. Wrapping the show, which has received an embarrassment of honours including 44 Emmy nominations, is understandably bittersweet for its cast members.

“It’s been a long, wild ride since we started seven years ago,” Goldberg says. “I think in a way it’s time, and the story is wrapping up in such a brilliant way. But, of course, we’re all going to mourn and grieve it massively. It’s been a life-changing job and we’ve made friends and relationships for life.”

In an interview on the popular YouTube series Off Camera with Sam Jones, Goldberg described the position she was in pre-Barry as “3pm, bathrobe still on, very much unemployed, banana, peanut butter and toast kind of meals.” Born in Vancouver, Canada, Goldberg was accepted into the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after high school and went on to forge a career on stage, earning an Olivier Award nomination for her dual role as Betsey/Lindsey in Clybourne Park in 2011. Despite this, and despite starring opposite Adam Driver and Matthew Rhys off-Broadway in 2012, Goldberg was a relative unknown with only a few small film roles to her name when her manager secured her an audition for Barry in 2016.

The audition process was traumatic, she’s said, recalling how she was 48 minutes late to the screen test (her manager accidentally drove her to the wrong venue), had to make a beeline for the toilet, then emerged to find Hader waiting right outside the door. “It couldn’t have been more humiliating,” Goldberg said. They ran the scene from Terms of Endearment where Shirley MacLaine screams at the hospital staff to give her daughter her pain meds, and Goldberg had no problem tapping into that anguish. “In a weird roundabout way, I think my manager got me the job, two heart attacks later,” said Goldberg. “I was so stressed.”

It’s easy to imagine Goldberg wowing them in that screen test — her stint in Barry has been punctuated by astonishing performances. There’s a brilliant monologue she delivers in season two, a two minute and thirty seconds long envy-fuelled brain dump when newbie actor Barry secures an audition with director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet The Parents). In season three, she delivers a toe-curlingly awkward speech at the premiere of Joplin, based on “a lot of very bizarre award acceptance speeches dating back from the ’70s to now,” Goldberg told Variety (she wouldn’t name names, but Sally Field is an obvious inspiration).

All performances on Barry are stellar, most prominently Hader’s marvellous turn as a tortured hitman trying to go straight, Henry Winkler’s self-involved but avuncular acting teacher Gene Cousineau, Anthony Carrigan’s goofy and improbably polite Chechen mobster NoHo Hank and Stephen Root as Barry’s self-serving handler, Fuches. Among this excellence, Goldberg stands out, not only because she matches if not outdoes her co-stars’ acting, but she’s also the only fully-formed female character in a male-dominated series. As such, it was crucial to Goldberg that Sally wasn’t the docile and sweet foil to Barry’s conflicted murderer.

“I’m not interested in seeing likeable women on television,” she says. “I think that the complexity of this writing is so rich, and there’s moments where we see a deeply vulnerable side of Sally and she’s incredibly thoughtful. And there’s times when we see a very dark, narcissistic, myopic version of Sally. And I think people can swing that pendulum in their own lives.”

Barry and Sally meet at Cousineau’s acting class in the pilot, and Sally’s single-minded pursuit of fame is what prevents her from realising her boyfriend is a violent criminal until the end of season three, when he’s finally arrested for murdering Cousineau’s girlfriend.

I was given access to the first seven episodes of season four (all but the finale), and at the start of Barry’s final season, Sally, rattled by Barry’s arrest, flies home to Joplin, Missouri, where she doesn’t find the comfort she’s seeking.

“She’s connecting all the dots of who this sociopath is that she was actually with and proceeds to have a full-blown panic attack in front of her mother while her mum is ordering tater tots and thinks that Sally’s being dramatic,” Goldberg explains. “Her father has sort of got his head in the sand and her mother is very, very cold, and there’s no safety or solace to be found.”

Back in Los Angeles, Sally finds an outlet as an acting teacher, taking over from Cousineau and employing some of his cruel tactics, with mixed results. “Sally’s being typical Sally where she thinks she’s doing the right thing but it just goes way too far,” says Goldberg. “But for me, I was also interested in the gender aspect, which is what we might accept from a male teacher versus what we would accept from a female teacher. And I think there’s some interesting commentary on that and the way that Sally’s received.”

Sally returns home in Barry’s final season.Credit:HBO/Foxtel

Four seasons is a relatively short run for an acclaimed series, but in the five years it’s been on-screen, Barry has paved the way for its breakout stars to become hot Hollywood property (and for Hader to direct the cinematic masterpiece he is surely sitting on).

Hader’s feat served as inspiration for Goldberg to create her own work. “The collaboration on this job taught me a lot and gave me a lot of confidence as a writer and I actually just produced, wrote and starred in my own show with my best pal [Susan Stanley], it’s called Sisters,” Goldberg says (the series is currently streaming on Stan). “It was a bit of life imitating art because we were putting that all together while Sally was running her show [on Barry].”

Hader and Barry co-creator Alec Berg taught Goldberg to be bold with her ideas and to embrace failure as part of the creative process. “You could throw out 10 crap ideas and the eleventh one was going to be brilliant, so it was about dropping that ego or preciousness around things and being willing to make a fool of yourself,” she says. “I learned a lot from that and got a lot of creative freedom out of that way of working.”

Beyond the performances and direction, a large part of Barry’s genius lies in its duelling themes — on one hand, a double-life thriller in the vein of Breaking Bad (while still very funny in moments, the series has drifted ever further from the comedy tag since its inception), and on the other, a wry commentary on the entertainment industry, where morals go to die.

In season three, Sally’s TV series is abruptly cancelled just 12 hours after its launch for failing to reach its target demographic. Earlier, Barry subjects Sally to an abusive tirade in her office after she declines his request to find a role for Cousineau. Sally’s younger co-star Katie is dismayed when her female superiors choose to ignore the situation. “They’re adults,” says a screenwriter. “I like my job,” she adds defensively, packing up her laptop and walking away.

Sally, meanwhile, has a trauma response to Barry’s outburst, going into placating mode like she used to with her violent ex. Learning more about her family in season four goes some way in explaining how she has come to see Barry as a safe haven. “She quite quickly realises after she goes home that she’s very alone in the world,” says Goldberg. “He’s the only person who’s seen her true monster and chooses to love her anyway.”

Bill Hader’s Barry Berkman is in jail in the show’s fourth season.Credit:HBO/Foxtel

Barry was excellent when it launched and has improved every season. By the penultimate episode of season four, packed with narrative and stylistic curveballs, it’s approaching masterpiece status. The show has had a fairytale impact on its main actors, especially Hader, who has made a definitive leap from funnyman to serious actor, and who has wanted to direct since he was a child film buff (among Barry‘s haul of the highest awards in the business are Emmys and Director’s Guild Awards for Hader’s direction, and he directs the final season of Barry in its entirety). Henry Winkler has also won Emmys and Critics’ Choice Awards for his performance, and (rightly) says Barry is the best thing he’s ever done.

Goldberg has only collected one Emmy nomination for Barry, in 2019, but deserves as many accolades as her co-stars. You might wonder if the award disparity might have something to do with Sally’s unlikeability, her solipsism apparently making her less sympathetic than a callous hitman or male narcissist.

Goldberg says she’s never been intimidated by the hostile response to Sally, or tempted to soften her edges. “She’s a complicated character, and that was always my goal with her, and to not worry about the peanut gallery because we can’t cater to that response or every woman on TV is going to be nice wife number three, you know?”

Barry season 4 premieres on April 17 on Binge.

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