Before she found herself with roles on two of the most acclaimed comedies on television, D’Arcy Carden “had a tendency to play nice, helpful moms, or 6-year-old boys.” This was on the subterranean stage at New York’s U.C.B. Theatre, where Carden performed improv alongside a laundry list of fellow future TV stars, from Broad City creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer to Jason Mantzoukas.
“Is he the funniest man alive?” Carden says, rhetorically, when I bring up Mantzoukas. As it turns out, he was in the first improv show she ever saw—the long-running ASSSCAT—and Carden describes watching it as “a lightning moment where I was like, ‘Oh my god. I have to do this. I need to do this. I don't know what it is, but I got to get on that stage.’” Years later, she and Mantzoukas re-teamed on a primetime NBC sitcom to play, respectively, an all-knowing, Siri-esque “not a robot” named Janet, and the half-witted boyfriend she created for herself, named Derek.
The stardom Carden has found for herself, both on NBC’s The Good Place and with a supporting role on the HBO series Barry, was unimaginable when she first came to New York as an actor in her early 20s. “I didn’t really know that comedy was an option unless you were going to be a stand-up comedian, or maybe unless you were going to be on S.N.L.,” she said. “So I would always get cast in these Shakespeare plays as the funny old lady or the funny prostitute or whatever. And it still didn’t quite click that I was a comedy actor.”
U.C.B. changed that—and after years of performing on the main stage while supporting herself as a temp and a nanny, she and her husband, Jason Carden, moved to Los Angeles in 2013. “I remember Adam [Pally, a friend from U.C.B.,] saying like, ‘It’s just like, a scientific fact. There are just more jobs out here,”’ Carden said. As she remembers it, the moment she moved to L.A., her old friends Glazer and Jacobson brought her back to New York for a recurring role on Broad City. But she still had “a couple of floundering around years in L.A.,” balancing writing and acting jobs with nannying.
“I did get to a point where I was like, “This isn’t going to work for me,’” she said. “Like, this dream isn’t going to happen. But it was just O.K., because you get to do some things here and there, and you get to perform at U.C.B. all the time. The thing you wanted, that thing of, like, being in an amazing comedy—like, truly, a Mike Schur comedy, which was my dream for so many years—that thing that you wanted, that goal that you had, it’s just not going to happen. You missed it. It’s too late. Let’s be realistic. It sucks, but just keep doing what you’re doing.”
One month later, she auditioned for The Good Place, created by none other than Mike Schur. Not long after, she shot the pilots for The Good Place and Barry within weeks of each other.
Through her “floundering” years, Carden watched many of her fellow U.C.B. alums—a list that also includes Zach Woods and Ellie Kemper—launch successful careers, a classic Hollywood story that usually ends with someone “accidentally” getting their leg broken or lying dead in a pool. But the tenets of improv, based on the “yes, and” concept of supporting your scene partners, kept the envy at bay. “Looking in from the outside, you would think that we would all be like kind of jealous monsters of each other,” Carden said. “I was in class with Aubrey Plaza when she got Funny People. You know what I mean? Like, we’re all just doing the same thing, and then someone gets plucked out.”
“The reason we get into improv instead of maybe stand-up or something—the deal with improv is that you want to support each other,” she continued. “You want to make your scene partner look like a genius, and trust that they will make you look like a genius. It’s all about building each other up. So your foundation, your soul, feels like, oh, I just want these people to do good. I want the best for these people.”
