Sarah Goldberg plays a delightfully atypical love interest on HBO’s Barry [Q&A]

Actress Sarah Goldberg brings the complex and difficult Sally Reed to life on HBO’s Barry.

In the first episode of HBO’s newest comedy series Barry, a hit man walks into an acting class to research his mark. Sounds like the beginning of a joke, right? Well, it is. Barry is the frequently hilarious study of an unmoored man trying to make sense of his life through a series of connections he makes in that single acting class. Barry (Bill Hader) not only finds a true passion for the craft, but he also meets a luminous and energetic woman named Sally Reed. Even though he knows barely anything about her, Barry maps his entire future out, immediately drawn to the idea of creating an idyllic life with this radiant and driven blonde.

On another series, Sally may have ended up as simply a foil to further the trajectory of Barry’s storyline. Historically, love interests – especially female love interests – have tended to lack narratives of their own. But, in an era of #MeToo, Sally is different. Barry doesn’t provide the central core for her storyline; she does. And she’s quite an entertaining mess. Her ambition has driven her to the point of delusion, and her stalled Hollywood career trajectory is pulling her toward the brink of madness. Sally might project an air of doe-eyed innocence, but beneath the surface, she’s equipped with razor sharp talons. The girl is out for blood, and she will cut anyone who gets in her way. Her self-centered tunnel vision matched with a wildly unstable emotional core make for a compelling character who straight up runs away with almost every single one of her scenes.

Oddly enough, the actress who portrays Sally could not be further from her oft outrageous character. Sarah Goldberg is a lovely Canadian actress who began her career on the London stage and just recently dipped her toe into the world of Hollywood. We chatted with her about her intriguing real-life inspiration for Sally’s rabid ambition, the benefits of improv, and what it’s like to work with Henry Winkler.

Hidden Remote: Let’s talk about Sally! She’s so intriguing because she’s not your typical love interest on a TV show.

Sarah Goldberg: “Yeah, she’s a bit of a nightmare.” [laughs]

Hidden Remote: Totally! And instead of being passive, she’s kind of using Barry to get ahead. How did you react when you first read the part of Sally?

Sarah Goldberg: “I loved it. I thought they did a brilliant thing in the pilot where they wrote someone that had this slightly unstable, manic energy, and you’re not sure which one you’re gonna get. You meet her, and you’re not sure if she’s sweet as pie, this small town girl, or is she this ruthless, ambitious nightmare. And she’s kind of both. They really managed to write somebody in their most vulnerable state as well as their most arrogant with this public/private thing. They show her in the realm where she’s super high status, and she’s the best in the class, and in another realm where she’s bottom of the barrel and can’t get arrested. So you see her grappling with ego in both of those realms, and I think it’s so brilliantly done.”

“I love that they wrote somebody who just isn’t that likeable. I said to Bill [Hader], ‘don’t worry about writing someone likeable. I don’t have to defend her. I don’t have to like this girl, I just have to know her.” I feel like I know Sally. She just a broken person. She’s somebody who just wants something so bad, and she has tunnel vision, and she’s so ambitious in a way that men are really never called out for, but of course women are. And she’s not being met with her offer in any way, and as she gets more and more downtrodden, the worst parts of her start to come out, and her mask starts to fall. She becomes this quite nasty character, and you feel that in another world she might have been a good person. But unfortunately as the world sh*ts on her, she’s got the wrong suit of armor on, and with Barry, she doesn’t see him at all. It’s like a game of projections. He’s projecting onto her what he wants, like this sweet girlfriend, and then Sally is projecting what she wants to see onto him. She sees herself adored and worshipped, but as soon as it’s not right for her, she tosses him aside.”

Hidden Remote: Their relationship seems to be a lot of surface. Nothing goes very deep. They’re projecting these ideals so they don’t have to face the truth.

Sarah Goldberg: “Totally. They’re both people that have to live in a lie. Barry has to live in a lie, and Sally’s whole life is based on delusion. So you’ve got these two people who can’t land in their own lives, and there’s no honesty in their own every day existence, so how are they going to bring that to a relationship? I find it really sad.”

Hidden Remote: “Like you said, Sally has these unlikeable characteristics to her as well, so how did you approach getting to that place for her?”

Sarah Goldberg: “I honestly feel like if the writing is good, it’s like your job is basically done. You just have to listen to the rhythm of what they [Barry creators Bill Hader and Alec Berg] wrote, because it’s so tight, but I would read the script and really hear her in my mind. I don’t know if I was really accessing anything, but I did find this travel diary I wrote when I was eighteen and I read some of it back for the first time recently with a friend with a bottle of wine, and we’d never laughed so hard. And I was like, oh, there she is! In that diary, there was this girl who was so hungry to do this and so ambitious in a way that I’m just way too tired to be now. [laughs] So I feel like somewhere in me, there was some of that. But in terms of accessing Sally’s more brutal side, it was just fun. I’m Canadian, so ‘sorry, thanks’ is basically how I introduce myself. So it’s fun to get to play someone whose filter is just gone. She’s working on a primal level of bitchiness.”

Hidden Remote: She definitely has those survival instincts very in tune. You have to protect yourself if you’re in the acting industry.

Sarah Goldberg: “I feel like Sally just found the wrong suit of armor somehow. She’s just got latex and she needs some sort of soft faux fur.”

Hidden Remote: In fact, her odd suit of armor definitely comes into play in this week’s episode. After an acting class, you share a charged scene with the great Henry Winkler. In fact, Sally and Winkler’s character Gene interact quite a lot in the series. Can you tell us about what it’s like to work with him?

Sarah Goldberg: “Yes! Working with Henry Winkler is like the biggest dream come true. He’s the mench of menches. Every Friday he’d come in with a new baked good. He’s truly the loveliest man, and he’s got so many years of experience, but he comes in every day like it’s his first day on the job. And if you’ve got Henry Winkler coming in with a buoyant energy of it being his first rodeo, everyone else kind of has to match that energy. We were very lucky. That man is truly one of a kind. He made us all laugh. He’s also just so generous. No ego. Between him and Bill it was like a daily mench-off.”

Hidden Remote: You talked a bit before about you and Bill Hader improving when you were up for the part, so did you do any improv to prep for shooting or at any point in the process?

More from HBO

• Hacks season 3 gets exciting release update: Here’s what we know
• Blue Beetle gets disappointing Max release update
• Friends snags No.1 spot on U.S. streaming services – and we’re not surprised
• Will there be a Steven Universe revival? Rebecca Sugar says “if there’s a huge amount of public demand”
• Industry season 3 is not coming until 2024: Here’s what we know about the release

Sarah Goldberg: “You know, we got to rehearse before every episode which is so rare and so lovely because we got together as a group and we would work out what we were doing in scenes before actually being in the pressured environment of actually shooting. They were also very collaborative. They sent us all of the scripts before hand, which is also very rare. Once we’d read them all, they called us to get our input. With Bill and Alec, there’s no ego. They’d call and Bill would say, ‘well, we’re at the point where you know the character better than we do, so is there anything that maybe she wouldn’t say?’ So there was always this open kind of thing, and always room to try something. But in terms of improv, the show was very tightly scripted, but occasionally they’d throw something in, especially with the acting class, where we’d get to improv. Like the scene where we were all interrogated, they just let the camera roll, and we got to just make up whatever. There were days where we got to goof around, and it was always loads of fun.”

Hidden Remote: Speaking of improv, you have quite extensive experience in the theater. Do you have any favorite acting exercises?

Sarah Goldberg: “Going back to Henry, as a prep thing before we did a table read for HBO, Bill thought it would be a good idea to have Henry run an acting class for us. He went and did a ton of research, and then came in and ran an actual class. We did a bunch of the usual stuff. I like games that get your energy up and collaborative games. But mostly when you have the script, you can look at your scene partner and really get to the bottom of what you’re doing and really find ways to connect.”

‘Barry’ airs Sundays at 10:30/9:30c on HBO.