We've already told you it's high time to catch up on the instant Mike Schur (The Office, Parks and Recreation) classic The Good Place, a laugh-out-loud take on the age-old "heaven and hell" narrative. (Season One is on Netflix now.) With this week's two-part Season Two premiere, Schur and his insanely loaded ensemble—Kristen Bell as the intrepid rule-breaker Eleanor, Ted Danson as Michael, the mastermind of the first season's ingenious twist, plus newcomers William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto, and D'Arcy Carden—proved there's still plenty of life left after…well, life.
Start binge-watching The Good Place now, because you definitely want to be caught up for season 2.
As Janet, the show's Siri of sorts—an indefatigable informational system bursting with personality and one-liners—Carden stands apart from the troupe in her relentlessly entertaining performance. Over lunch at a Lower East Side hotel in New York earlier this week, the California native opened up about the show's second season, and how she's turned the non-human Janet into a remarkably nuanced scene-stealer.
You didn't find out about the twist until halfway through filming the first season, right?
Yeah. It's so funny thinking back on that. We knew there was gonna be a twist, and the whole time, truly from audition on, it was shrouded in secrecy. Mike Schur and Drew Goddard told us, "Eleanor is not supposed to be there and she admits it." And then we just had to wait, going episode-to-episode. Mid-day shooting one day after lunch, Mike was like, "Come meet us in the other room." And he took us through the end of the season. I had thought about all the possibilities, but I still didn't guess.
Mike Schur is known for letting his actors improv a lot, but The Good Place narrative is so tightly wound that I wonder if you have that freedom on set.
Parks and Rec was known for being improv-heavy. I think everybody knows they had this thing called a "Fun Run," where they would do it scripted and then the last take, they would just go nuts. We don't really have that on the show, but it would be welcome. People would be happy. If anybody wants to improvise, the director or whoever, we'd be down for it. But we just don't. We just don't do it because the scripts are so tight.
I love to improvise, and that's where my background lies, but I still am like, "I don't wanna waste anyone's time on this." What I am gonna come up with is not gonna be fresher or better than the amount of thought that these writers put in? It's not like they were like, "How about this idea?" If you go into the writers' room, it looks like A Beautiful Mind. It's truly like a murder plot, like they're trying to figure out who killed who, pictures everywhere and notes on a board. It is overwhelming to walk into the writers' room. They know what they're doing.
The Janet "reboot" scenes let you play around with actual "human" emotion as Janet for a change. Do those moments let you flex different acting muscles?
Oh, totally. The straight-Janet scenes are, surprisingly, the hardest ones for me. It's such a weird, fine line. You don't wanna be a robot, because then what are we watching?
Especially because the emphasis is that Janet is not a robot.
Exactly! think that the episode where there's a reboot, that was the first time where I felt at ease. I remember pulling Mike Schur aside during lunch one day. I think I said, "So you know Janet's hard, right?" [laughs] And he was like, "Yeah, I do." It was shocking to me that it was so difficult.
When you're an actor, you're supposed to react to things. You're supposed to have an opinion on things, anything that your fellow actor says to you, you let it hit you and react. With Janet, you don't do that. You know what it's gonna be. It's just positivity and light and helpfulness. She's just… nothing gets under her… skin, question mark? All of those rebooted Janets were very, very fun.
But: It's not a spoiler when I say Janet goes off the damn rails this season. There's a lot of fun.
You went into your audition not knowing anything other than it was Mike, right?
Yes. I knew Kristen Bell. I knew Ted Danson. I knew Mike Schur. I knew Drew Goddard. Nothing else.
Did you get called in specifically for the role?
It was kind of a normal audition that I would get through my agent or manager. I audition for things like that all the time. I never get them. I never got them! It's just another day in the life. You don't even think about it.
For some reason, this one felt a little different right off the bat, because my true dream was to work for Mike Schur. So this, when I saw the email, I was kind of like, "Oh god, this one's gonna be hard for my emotions, because I will not get it."
I put a little extra work into this audition, because I was like, "I know I won't get the role, but I would like to impress Mike Schur." I would like him to give me one line in an episode at some point. And you tell yourself that that's gonna happen at some point, like, "This'll be good." So I did the thing of, "Of course I'm not gonna get the job." It's not even about that!
I knew it was gonna be Drew Goddard and Mike Schur. That's very intimidating. But for some reason, the second I walked in, they were calm and smiling and laughing and it felt very comfortable. It felt too comfortable, because I was expecting, I don't know, snobby asshole Hollywood dudes? But they were very cool. I walked out feeling, "Shit, that was actually the best."
When I went in for my first audition, an older woman was after me—much older—and a 16-year-old boy was before me—auditioning for Janet. So they really didn't know what they wanted. A 16-year-old boy! Who, by the way, is a genius. When I saw him, I remember texting a friend who had done a movie with him and I was like, "I'm auditioning after him. Why am I even here? He's of course going to get it."
Did they test you with Ted Danson?
They didn't. But it was my first test for a TV show. And I did it by myself. Usually you do them with another actor. Man, I wonder how I would've felt if I had to do that with Ted, because Will Harper [who plays Chidi] did have to do his with Kristen Bell [Eleanor].
Maybe it's because Janet doesn't have to have human chemistry.
Truly! They could have put a mannequin next to me. A pillow. It doesn't matter the thing I'm talking to.
Is it true that before you auditioned for The Good Place, you thought you were done acting?
It was more like I had this sort of epiphany that I was like… "D'Arcy. You're not gonna do the thing you thought you'd do, be on a TV show with a bunch of funny people. Those dreams you had are not gonna happen, but that's OK, because you get to perform every night at the UCB." That was a month before this audition, which is cool and crazy.
Acting is such a sad little desperate job where every job interview is you begging for a job. And it happens every day, and you have no control, and it's just this sad little thirsty job. The trick is to be confident and to not be thirsty. That's how you get the job. It's a fucking mindfuck. Don't get into it. We did the hard thing.
I got a late-night email that I got the job, and I lost my mind. My husband and I screamed and danced around the room. We live in a duplex with two of our best friends, Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello from Broad City. So we ran upstairs, had champagne, screamed. It was just a very good moment in my life. I'd never want to say the word "blessed," but I truly felt so grateful.
Have you sat down with the writers and established a Janet rulebook at any point?
In a way. We actually didn't do it the first season, but at the beginning of the second season, before we started filming, I did have a lunch with all of the writers. It was basically them saying, "You trust us. We trust you if you make a decision about Janet."
So what are some of the decisions you make as Janet, as far as what she knows, how she acts, how she "feels"? Because your Janet feels like a very informed performance.
The funny thing is that in the beginning, it didn't feel like that, the first few episodes. Quickly I was like, "Janet wouldn't do that." Again, these writers are amazing. Rarely, if ever, would it be in the script where I'd say, "Oh, Janet wouldn't say that." I mean rarely. Maybe once or twice. I would read a line and be like, "Um, I don't know if Janet would say that." We'd do it at the read through and then the next day, we'd have a different script and it would be gone. They know. We share a brain.
When she's in regular Janet mode, she is not judgmental. She is the most positive, always looking at the glass half full. Unflappable. Whatever it is, it's deep within me and I don't know why. I think it's because the writing is so strong. They get it. I imagine that the work that these writers and Mike put into these scripts is ten times what a normal great show would do. I imagine it makes them crazy. I wonder if it's even fun. It seems very hard.
What is it like working with Ted Danson, your most frequent scene partner on the show?
I am so happy talking about Ted. I have nothing bad to say. You want to hear that Ted Danson is an asshole, but he's the greatest human alive. He's so funny. He's a giddy little weirdo. He's very silly, he's very caring. Let's say you've met him. You see him again, and you hope he just remembers that he's met you, and then he says, "How's your sister doing? I remember she just had a baby." He's a deeply good person. He also loves being an actor, and he's been doing this job for a while, and he's had some great success, and that can make people bitter and shitty. But every day he's happy to be on set.
Knowing that Janet is this informational system who knows all, how do you play her without human emotions without coming off as a Dwight Schrute-ian know-it-all?
I think early on there was a tendency for me to do the know-it-all. I could feel myself going to "annoying corrector," which just didn't feel right. And I knew Mike wasn't wanting to go in that direction. So we just kept saying, "Positive, no judgment." If I would do a take that was a little on the judgmental side, he knew exactly what to say to me to get me back to positive, happy, easy-going Janet.
And the fun thing with Season Two, she does get to have more emotions. A lot more. If I knew a script was coming that night, I would cancel plans. The second it would get there, I would want to read it and re-read it. It was the highlight of my week, always.
That's the other thing about you saying nice things about Janet. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it, but it's the writers who write funny shit for Janet. She gets to come on and say a funny thing and disappear. I'm lucky! If you didn't think Janet was funny, I would be doing a very bad job.
