She's not a woman and not a robot, but she is an Emmy nominee.
D'Arcy Carden is nominated for Supporting Actress in a Comedy for her role as virtual assistant Janet on NBC's The Good Place, and while Janet may not fully understand the magnitude of such a thing, Carden says the character would still be thrilled.
"She'd look around and see that other people are excited and she would mirror that," Carden tells E! News. "You know Janet. She'd be like, 'Are you guys happy? Great. It makes me happy, too.'"
Carden had her work cut out for her on The Good Place, because Janet was not just one character. There was Good Janet, Bad Janet, Neutral Janet, Disco Janet, and in one episode, a whole crowd of different kinds of Janet. There was also one episode in season three in which Carden played Janet versions of all the human characters, and each one of them was perfect. Even Bad Janet is still lovable Janet.
"I love that character so much," she says. "I'm so honored, and I just feel very lucky to get to play such a unique and positive character, and also I got spoiled playing so many different versions of her. But the whole experience was just too good to be true. I got to be on my favorite show with my favorite people playing my favorite character, and then to get a nomination for the last one...I feel like I'm living in a damn dream world."
Carden watched the nomination ceremony with her husband and her dog, and while her category wasn't announced during the livestream, she was already celebrating nominations for the show and Ted Danson.
"Then I got a text from my manager and my publicist and they said, 'I hope this isn't spoiling anything, but you're an Emmy nominee," she says. "We just were sort of like awestruck. It was excited and happy. We weren't screaming or jumping all over the place, we were just like, 'Wow. Oh my God. Wow.' It was cool."
Ted Danson and Maya Rudolph have both received multiple nominations for their roles on the show before and are both nominated once again, but this is the first year that any other main actor from the show has been honored. William Jackson Harper also scored a nomination in Supporting Actor in a Comedy for his role as Chidi, and Carden says she and Harper "FaceTimed each other right away."
"With Ted, it's like, yeah, Ted's getting nominated. He gets nominated every year. He's broken some records," she says. "And Will and I were definitely not expecting that, so we FaceTimed each other and just kind of screamed for a minute."
The show scored a total of six Emmy nominations for its final season, and Carden says that the fact that it was the end added "a whole 'nother level" to the excitement of being recognized.
"It feels like a long time ago. There's like another level of gratefulness that we weren't forgotten, or whatever. It's so nice that people are still thinking about the show," she explains. "The cast and the whole Good Place family just feel so strongly about that show and it's really special that it would get a send off like this. It's awesome, like, oh my God, are you kidding me?"
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