Sarah Goldberg Unpacks the Actor's Life in 'Barry'

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Sarah Goldberg was forty-five minutes late to her screen test for Barry, HBO’s dark comedy starring Bill Hader as a Marine-turned-hitman-turned-budding actor that just returned for its second season. “I’m Canadian and polite and I’ve never been late for anything in my life,” she laughs. “Then the first scene was a scene from Terms of Endearment—which we didn’t end up using because we couldn’t get the rights—and we started it and I just burst into tears after all the stress. But it probably got me the job in the end.”

The 33-year-old Vancouver native plays Sally Reed, a gregarious and self-serving aspiring actor and the perfect foil to Hader’s introverted Barry Berkman. Sally is also Barry’s love interest, blissfully unaware of his homicidal line of work, and a character Goldberg says couldn’t be farther from herself, though she’s not unfamiliar. “I mean, I know that girl and I’ve said that to [Hader and Barry co-creator Alec Berg] from the beginning, when there was criticism of her being too narcissistic or too ambitious or all these things,” she says. “I begged them not to dilute her because I’ve met that girl in a bar in L.A. and I care about that girl, you know? She’s totally lost and desperate.”

Goldberg’s own career began in London, after a childhood spent acting in school plays. She studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, covering everything “all the way back from Greek tragedy all the way forward up to Arthur Miller.” She took tap dancing and flamenco classes (“which I was absolutely shit at”), which were intended to make actors mentally flexible enough to learn skills as needed to land a role. Just after graduating, she was cast as bride-to-be Janice Evans in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, a stage adaptation of her novel by the same name. “My first job was at the Young Vic and I got it right as I left school, so I was really spoiled. I thought, ‘Oh, this is the life of an actor, you do eight shows a week and you have the code to the dressing rooms,’” she laughs. “And I was very quickly working in a gastropub in Notting Hill.”

Fast forward a bit, and Goldberg was cast in productions like Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, written as a spin-off of A Raisin in the Sun and in which she played the roles of Betsy and Lindsey (earning her an Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress), and Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia, the story of two sons who confront their mother after being left out of her memoir. Then she came stateside in 2012 for the Off-Broadway production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, in which she played the role of Alison Porter opposite Adam Driver and Matthew Rhys.

Two years later, she finally settled in New York (in Driver’s old apartment) after landing the role of Lolly Lavigne in VH1’s Hindsight, a comedy-drama series about a woman who reexamines her life choices after time-traveling back to 1995. The show was canceled after one season, but then Goldberg got a call about a new opportunity. “I was really living the actor’s dream of, like, in-your-bathroom-at-three PM, banana-peanut-butter-on-toast days and thinking I would never work again,” she recalls. “My best pal had recently become my manager. We had been working together for two weeks and he gave me a call and he was like, ‘Bill Hader has a new pilot for HBO and I think it’s your job.’ And I was like, ‘Great, let’s do that!’”

Sally Reed is sitting on a staircase shouting obscenities the first time Barry meets her in the show’s pilot episode. “Don’t you fucking call me lady!” She’s rehearsing for an acting class, the very same one Barry joins after watching her struggle with and subsequently nail the scene that requires her to berate someone. We learn that Sally is afraid she’ll never make it as an actress and later, with a slow-motion shot of her dancing, that Barry is smitten with her. Over the course of the season, they sleep together, grow apart, and come back together after Barry delivers a line in the acting class showcase with scene-altering intensity. It’s also in this showcase that Sally delivers a performance strong enough to earn her a meeting with a talent agent, a triumph for her after surviving failed auditions and a predatory agent who wanted sex in exchange for signing her. In the season finale, Sally tells Barry over drinks about her abusive ex-husband and the past she’s been trying to escape all along.

Later in that same scene, she tells Barry that her process of becoming a character involves using personal traumas to stoke her emotions. “Plus, you know, I don’t have healthcare and it’s cheaper than therapy,” she remarks. Goldberg, on the other hand, says she takes a more detached approach to bringing a character to life. “I’ve always been more fascinated with, like, if you have a character, you put them way over across the room and try to walk toward them,” she says. “The reason I want to do this job is curiosity in other people and empathy for other people. It’s more fun and interesting to try to really step into their skin instead of searching deep within yourself for your own traumas.”

In order to play Alison in Look Back in Anger, for example, a character who divulges she’s pregnant at the beginning of the play and suffers a miscarriage by the end, Goldberg imagined a story about a woman who’s recently miscarried and boards a train to see her husband. She walks past a mother holding her baby, who promptly “flings her baby on her and says, ‘Hold this for a sec while I put my suitcase up.’” Channeling that kind of abrupt, ill-fated event was how Goldberg brought herself to tears every performance.

Creating a distance between her personal and professional lives, she says, helps her stay balanced and better able to take on new roles. “I would say that I sort of prioritize my life and taking care of myself and hopefully I can bring that to my work versus the other way around,” she says. She did, however, dive back into her past for a new project and was surprised to find her inner Sally Reed. “I recently had to reread journals of mine for a project and I’ve never looked at them before,” she says. “I was really shocked by the voice, and I was like, ‘Oh, there she is. Sally’s so in there,’ like this ambitious teen with myopia who just wanted this thing so bad and had this tunnel vision like, ‘Acting is everything.’”

Goldberg now resides in Brooklyn Heights and she’s working on a script for a TV pilot with a friend of hers from London. Downtime between projects, she says, is one of her biggest challenges as an actor, because she’s left with “post-show blues” and suddenly in charge of finding her next project. She’s stayed busy though. This year, she appears in the stock market trading drama The Hummingbird Project as Masha, the matriarch of a Russian Jewish family, and in The Report as April, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program after September 11.

In the future, she dreams of playing Kate Keller in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons because of her depth and complexity. “Kate Keller is a grief-stricken woman living a lie for survival. She has to keep things buoyant until the breaking point. I find that kind of duality fascinating,” she says. Annette Bening, in whose footsteps Goldberg says she’d love to follow, takes on the role on Broadway this month. Ultimately, Goldberg is open to whatever comes her way. “I feel like your career as an artist, as an actor, is never as curated as people might imagine,” she says. “[The legendary director and playwright] Mike Leigh has some quote, which I’m going to butcher now, about your career not being something tangible, ever, in your hands. It’s something you look back on and say, “Oh, I did that.’”

Barry continues on Sundays on HBO.