The Good Place's D'Arcy Carden Wouldn't Have Been Ready for Janet 10 Years Ago

D'Arcy Carden has a caterpillar crawling on her sweater. It's the first thing she notices before we meet up in Silver Lake, a hipster neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. Even as we discover that our original proposed lunch location is closed and wander down the street to a new pizza place, Carden is worried about where the small bug came from. Was it in her car? Was there a nest in her sweater drawer at home? Did he fall out of a tree?

Over the course of our hourlong lunch, I discover this concern for the things and people around her is a pretty central part of who Carden is. A pupil of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv scene, Carden is an expert at throwing the proverbial ball to other people, even when talking about her rise to fan-favorite status as Janet on NBC's The Good Place.

"I have a great, incredibly supportive husband, Jason, who does a similar thing. He's a producer and he knows this sort of lifestyle and we really sort of help each other, support each other and lift each other up and talk it through and cry it out. He's my dude," Carden tells me between bites of her chicken and kale salad. "We have this great group of friends that all kind of do the same thing. We're all doing this thing and we have been doing it for 15 years. How is that possible? It's been really exciting and incredible and sort of unheard of that we get to do this together."

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Those friends include Broad City creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, along with The Other Two scribes Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider. They all came up in the UCB New York scene together before Jacobson and Glazer started their web series that led to their Comedy Central critical darling and before Kelly and Schneider joined the writing team at Saturday Night Live. Carden spent a few years watching her group of friends get great gigs and live the dream while she still clawed for her chance. That could have easily made her bitter, but the word Carden has been using to describe herself after that struggle is on the opposite side of the emotional spectrum: ready.

"What I mean by that is, I got into acting when I was a kid, but I got [specifically into] comedy in my very early 20s, and I'm not in my very early 20s anymore, at all. I feel very prepared," Carden explains. "I mean, there's an alternate universe in which I got on a Good Place-type of show at 22, right? I think that would have been very stressful, and being on a big network TV show in my early 20s could have been something that I felt like I was ready for, but wasn't actually ready for. It ... might've been bad, might've been a stressful life. Whereas this life is, I feel like I got my chops."

To say that Carden is having a "moment" right now risks belittling the decade and a half of work that Carden put into becoming the actress she is now, but it does feel like the world is finally catching on to the amount of talent she possesses. This year she's part of three Emmy contender series: HBO's Barry, Broad City, and of course, The Good Place.

That last series gave her an entire episode to showcase her remarkable talent. Midway through its third season, The Good Place put Carden at bat with the episode "Janet(s)," in which Carden is on screen playing between two and five different versions of the eponymous character at any given moment. After Janet Prime takes the humans to her "void" -- a pocket of existence that sits outside of space and time -- they take on her form while retaining their own personalities, forcing Carden to play every series regular role outside of Ted Danson's Michael, and those characters are often having complicated conversations with each other.

"I remember reading the whole script with my hand over my face, like reading it with one eye," Carden recounts, putting a hand over her face to demonstrate. "Janet doesn't take up a lot of screen time anyway in any episode. ... Usually, she pops in and she pops out. The idea that it would just be me in every scene was overwhelming. ... Oh man, it was this mix of such an honor and so stressful and the stress was mostly that they trusted me with this."

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To prepare for the mammoth episode, Carden did what she knows how to do best: She went to work. She studied the way her co-stars moved and spoke. She recorded the table read, where they read the parts she'd be playing, and listened to it on repeat for weeks to get the cadence of each human-Janet correct. When they filmed the episode, Carden banned her co-stars from set so she could focus -- "I didn't want to ever do them in front of them," she says -- and only made one "diva" request to production: to have a mirror in her dressing room so she could see herself in each costume before every scene and know which Janet she was playing at any given time. It's impossible to imagine how she could have been more prepared, but Carden spent the months between shooting and air time second-guessing.

"I'm not incredibly needy and I'm confident enough, but man oh man, those months after it, I would cry to my husband and just be like, 'I didn't do it right. It's not going to be good. I f---ed it up. It's bad,'" Carden tells me. "[Jason] would just be like, 'You did everything you could. You put in tons of work. There's nothing more you could have done. You did your best and so now we just have to wait and see how it turns out.'"

It turned out fantastic, by the way, but Carden still defers the credit to the people around her. It's not false modesty or a lack of self-esteem, but just evidence of years of making comedy as part of a team.

"There's something about the way [Good Place creator Michael Schur] writes and that group in the writers' room. They're a bunch of super funny, super smart, super snarky writers that is wrapped in one big giant heart," she says. "They're smart and it's not cheesy. ... They're like equal parts heart and bitchy. It's like somehow they balance the edge and the heart in the same show, the same speech. It's really amazing."

As we finish lunch in an outdoor courtyard, we encounter two more insects: a ladybug and a mysterious six-legged creature neither of us can identify. We're both reminded of the caterpillar that unexpectedly joined us at the start of this interview, and Carden decides he must have come from a nearby tree. My final question: Does Carden feel like the caterpillar or like she's further on in the metamorphosis?

"I think I'm in the freaking cocoon. My UCB days and my super struggle days were [a] little caterpillar inching down the road. Now, I feel like I'm in my cocoon. I'm working really hard and I'm making a lot of sacrifices in my personal life. ... It's a big weird job, a big weird time commitment and you kind of can lose track of important things in your life because you're sort of in your work cocoon," she claims. "I think the next step is to become Mariah Carey and spread my wings."

Fortunately, it seems like the world is ready to see D'Arcy Carden fly.

The Good Place returns to NBC this fall.