Since it started in 2018, HBO’s Barry has delighted in putting Sarah Goldberg through the wringer. Her character, Sally, regularly bore the brunt of the show’s emotional extremes. She was abused, screamed at, humiliated, publicly shamed, kidnapped and plunged into addiction, plus she murdered a guy. Goldberg has been rightly recognised for her performance – she was nominated for an Emmy in 2019 – but Sally operated at such a full-blast, red-raw frequency that I was wary in case time spent with Sarah would involve similar levels of intensity.
I needn’t have worried. I meet Goldberg in a sunlit, slightly ramshackle south London cafe full of mums and babies. She drifts in by herself, unrecognised and greets me with a goofy wave. It’s the day after her 38th birthday, and the Barry finale aired 72 hours ago to near-universal acclaim. All said, it has been a big week for the Canadian.
“I feel like I’m not going to be able to digest the finale for a decade,” she says of Barry, settling in with a flat white. Is she pleased with the final scenes, in which Sally landed on something approaching contentment? “I feel like the story rounded off in the right way, and the response has been positive,” she says, breaking into a grin. “Although I was very distracted this week because I was watching the Succession finale.”
Is she pleased at how that ended? “I’m obsessed with Tom Wambsgans,” she says. “I always wanted Sally to be a little bit like Tom. Somebody who is seemingly the underdog. But then, as soon as they’re in a position of power, they become the bully themselves.”
It can be easy to forget that Barry was conceived as a comedy, about Bill Hader’s eponymous character struggling to shake off his career as a hired assassin to make it as an actor. The darkness that gradually enveloped the show, especially in its latter stages, came as a surprise to many. But not to Goldberg. This, it turns out, was all part of the long-term plan.
“Bill asked me in season one where I saw this going for the character,” she says. “I was like, I don’t care what we do, but I want to go full Woman Under the Influence, full Gena Rowlands. And he held true to his promise.”
What will she miss about Barry? “I could search scripts my whole lifetime and never find a role quite like Sally,” she says. “Not only is there the crazy arc she was on, but she played all these roles within the role.” Equally important to her was her experience on set. “The show was tightly scripted, and the decisions weren’t casual, but we were so trusting of each other by the end,” she says. “We could invent scenes fresh on the day and find things spontaneously as we went, which is so rare. It’s not brain surgery. Everyone should have a nice day. We’re not saving the world.”
Happily, Goldberg was able to take this experience and use it to good effect. She, and her best friend Susan Stanley, whom she met while studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) served as the star, writer and showrunner of SisterS, a fantastic new Canadian-Irish comedy-drama about two women who learn that they share the same father and embark upon a catastrophe-filled road trip across Ireland to find him.
“I started writing SisterS with Susan back when Barry was still in its embryonic stages,” says Goldberg. “Susan and I have been trying for decades to write something together. We met in 2004, and we couldn’t have been more opposite. I was so green. I was living with the school drug dealer for six months and didn’t even realise. I just thought that everybody came over for 15 minutes after school because we were popular.”
What was their dynamic initially? “I was so wide-eyed and optimistic,” she says. “Susan was this hard, rollie-smoking Dublin girl – I thought she was the coolest girl in school. I was like, she’s gonna be my best friend.”
The SisterS script finally came together in 2016, when Goldberg was living in New York. “We knew we wanted to make something, and we were slightly frustrated by the patriarchy. Carving out careers as young actresses was really challenging. The scripts that came through for us were all for Wife Number Three, where every line is a question or a piece of exposition. We felt like we had stories, and didn’t feel that those things were represented in the scripts we were reading.”
Eventually Declan Lowney, whose TV credits include Father Ted and Ted Lasso, came onboard as the series director. “We were so precocious. We were like ‘We don’t want a man directing our show! We want a young woman!’ But we met Declan, and he was incredible. He had a sheet of 20 questions that just got right underneath the script. It was like he was related to all the characters, and he knew exactly what we were trying to do. We shot six episodes in six weeks. By contrast, we shoot eight episodes of Barry in four or five months. The learning curve was vertical. Suze always says it’s really hard when your dreams come true, and she’s not wrong.”
If you live almost anywhere else in the world, SisterS is easy to watch – it’s on Crave in Canada, RTÉ One in Ireland and AMC+ in America – but, frustratingly, has yet to find a British home. This is disappointing because the show is tremendous. It is both funny and impossibly sad. The final episodes, especially, touch on the subject of alcoholism with a beautiful precision that isn’t often seen on TV.
“We wanted to really show it for what it is, the Jekyll and Hyde of it,” says Goldberg. “We wanted to go ugly with it and try not to sugarcoat it.” The alcoholism is so well observed, and SisterS seems such a personal story, that I ask if she or Stanley have first-hand experience of it.
“I mean, we do,” she replies, hesitantly. “We were writing from a place of knowledge, but we’re both very private about it. Everyone in our stories is still alive. We’re both pretty protective of our loved ones.”
Goldberg holds privacy dear. She isn’t on social media – she is surprised when I tell her that an old Barry clip of hers, in which Sally is told that an algorithm has cancelled her critically acclaimed streaming show, has become a focal point of the Writers Guild of America strikes – and her Wikipedia page is vague to the point of redaction. There is so much about her that nobody knows, I say. People might not have realised that she is a long-time London resident. How did that happen?
“I took a year out after high school and backpacked around Europe. Of everywhere I visited, I really fell in love with London,” she replies. “My first stop was Piccadilly Circus. I was like, wow!”
Goldberg was born in north Vancouver in 1985, and raised by her ophthalmologist father, along with her older sister (an artist who lives in Berlin) and younger brother (who stayed in Vancouver and works in a camera department). Her father’s parents, Eva and Emanuel Goldberg, were Holocaust survivors who moved to Canada in the 1950s. “They never returned to Europe in their lifetime,” she says. “My grandpa would say ‘Europe is a graveyard,’ but I think he would find it beautiful that his granddaughters now live in Berlin and London. There is hope in that.”
Eventually Goldberg enrolled at Lamda, an institution, she repeatedly points out, that is older than Canada, and set about carving out a career on the stage, receiving an Olivier nomination for her role in Clybourne Park at the Royal Court. She later moved to New York: “That was thanks to the Conservative government getting in, and my visa running out, and me getting booted, even though I had been here for nine years on five visas and I was a taxpayer,” she says, with happy venom. She soon returned. This is her home, she says. Not even finding regular, celebrated work on Barry in Los Angeles could keep her away from London.
“There’s something about being in England where it doesn’t feel like actors are commerce,” she says.
Goldberg was in Los Angeles when Covid struck, and the national response was another reason for wanting to return. “You know how everyone here was stocking up on toilet paper?” she asks. “They were doing that there too, but they were also queuing for guns. It was a dystopian moment. The truth is, when that happens, you want to be where your roots are. But I will say that Henry and Stacy Winkler – please print this – really came to our rescue. They would call us and check in. Henry would say: ‘There are sandwiches on the front porch if you need them.’ They were like our parents.”
Covid also moved along Goldberg’s personal life. When the pandemic began, Barry was about to start filming and she was living in Culver City, in LA County, with her boyfriend, the screenwriter Alex Warren. “I’m a Canadian who had a US visa. He’s a Brit with an ESTA [visa waiver], so we were in a very precarious position,” she says. So their response? “We had a Barry table read on Wednesday, and on Friday the Canadian border was closed,” she says. “The following Monday we got married.”
That sounds sudden. “We had a very clear decision to make, which was either get married or be separated,” she says. “It was like a wartime wedding. At 9am, Al proposed. We found this amazing guy on rapidmarriages.com, who for a small premium was willing to go out to the beach in Malibu. We had six friends there, all 6ft apart. A friend of mine brought a bouquet of wildflowers. I had this old vintage dress and boots. We got married on the beach and we had family there on FaceTime.”
Almost two hours have flown by and our drinks have grown cold. Goldberg has kept busy since Barry wrapped; she has spent the last few weeks shuttling backwards and forwards to Cardiff to film a major role in the upcoming series of Industry, and now has to leave to discuss a film part with a big Hollywood director. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of Sarah Goldberg in future. For now, we’ll always have Barry. And, as soon as a UK broadcaster decides to see sense, SisterS.
