Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.

Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.

I wish more people asked about the crew. I wish more people asked about the designers, about the head of departments, about the cinematography, because when I think of the show, I think of you and those people. MYHA’LA: Yeah. LAWTEY: They’re entirely intrinsic to the show. Whatever people take in as an end product is built by them. We have the blessing and the curse of being the face of that, but it takes a village. We’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have some pretty special villages over the last five years. Mirna was one of those. We spoke about the hair at the start. I want to make sure that my hair doesn’t take away from her work. She was very much on top of my hair, but I said, “Is it okay if I just do it before I come in?” Just because I think there are very few opportunities to feel autonomy as an actor.

The sense of control that you have over what you’re doing often feels quite disconnected and sparse. To have the chance to try to claim some of that can make a real difference to your level of confidence in your work. Because ultimately, you’re going to give everything you have and then it will be taken away from you and made into something that is beyond your control. I heard this quote from this interview with Donald Sutherland recently where he was talking about Marlon Brando, who he knew very well, and he said, “I think it must be very trying when you’re that good and that exquisite, you put your body, yourself, your soul, your ideas in the hands of someone else and allow them to take it, cut it into little pieces, and create a character different from the character that you thought you were giving them. And you have to accept that. And if you accept that, then it’s an adult vocation.”