‘The Good Place’ Star D’Arcy Carden Admits She Had A Hard Time Playing Janet In The Beginning

D’Arcy Carden revealed that it took her a while before she finally figured out the perfect treatment for her “The Good Place” character, Janet.

During a chat at the backstage of EW PopFest last weekend, Carden admitted that she struggled at first in portraying her Siri-like role on the NBC comedy series.

“It was hard in the beginning because she’s very non-judgmental and she doesn’t have emotions; she’s mimicking what a human would do, so there was a lot of pulling back on my part,” the comedienne explained. “I was talking to [series co-creator] Michael Schur like ‘I don’t know if I’m getting this [right], I don’t know if I’m being the robot that you envisioned.’”

Although Schur had a clear picture of what Janet should be like, Carden told Entertainment Weekly last month that the two-time Emmy winner let her play different versions of Janet until they figured out together who she really is as a character.

“Mike Schur knows exactly what everything should look like, but at the same time is super collaborative and loves working with actors that make choices and bring stuff to the table,” Carden said. “So they were very willing to let me try a lot of different versions of Janet and then we knew we would figure out who she was as we went. The funny thing is that I would try a more emotional Janet or a more robotic Janet, but what I’m seeing on the screen is exactly what Mike originally explained, it’s exactly what he wanted; the Janet he explained is what we ended up going with, which is so funny and perfect.”

“The Good Place” just aired its midseason finale (Season 1, Episode 9) last night. Although NBC has yet to set an exact return date for the series, the show’s official Twitter account revealed that Season 1, Episode 10 will air in January 2017.