Sarah Goldberg didn't want to be 'the girl next door.' So she charted a tougher path

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Few people do simmering panic as nimbly as Sarah Goldberg.In her role as Dr.JoAnne Felder, a performance psychologist tending to the mercurial psyches of the billionaire man-children of Silicon Valley on the new AMC satire “The Audacity,” Goldberg careens from serene to slapstick as she tries to keep a lid on her increasingly unruly life.It is the latest in a string of enviably layered characters for the Vancouver native, including her Emmy-nominated breakout turn as aspiring actor Sally Reed on the HBO contract killer dramedy “Barry” and the coolly calculating portfolio manager Petra Koenig on the network’s drama “Industry.” “I’m definitely learning some large tech and finance words that I didn’t know,” she says with a laugh about her recent wealth-adjacent roles on a Zoom from London, where she makes her home.

“I’m not sure if I’ll retain them.”Given the accolades, it seems likely Goldberg only needs to memorize her lines and the rest will follow.While she has given a distinctive performance in each of her roles, one of several threads tying the characters together is a moment when fear, rage, excitement, ambition or all of the above collide but must be contained.While that discipline sometimes devolves into delicious displays of apoplexy — witness Goldberg’s incredible, expletive-littered elevator meltdown in “Barry” — the 40-year-old actor is more often the face of diplomacy while telegraphing cortisol levels in the red beneath her placid exterior.“As a blond Canadian, I really ran the risk of being the girl next door,” she says of her attempt to dodge typecasting onscreen after cutting her teeth onstage in London and New York in the mid-2010s.

“I didn’t want to be the girl next door … maybe the girl next door with bodies in the basement.”While the only bodies to be found in JoAnne’s basement on “The Audacity” are her ...