D'Arcy Carden

D'Arcy Beth Carden, born Darcy Beth Erokan on January 4, 1980, in Danville, California, is an American actress and comedian who made her Broadway debut in The Thanksgiving Play in 2023, earning a Theatre World Award for her performance. Her father, Dennis Erokan, emigrated from Istanbul to California as a child and later founded the music magazine BAM and its technology-focused spinoff MicroTimes; her mother is American. Carden has two sisters, Miranda and Laney, and one brother, Will. During junior high school, she added an apostrophe to her first name, inspired by Smashing Pumpkins bassist D'arcy Wretzky. She graduated from San Ramon Valley High School in 1998 and subsequently earned a BFA in Theater from Southern Oregon University.

After completing her degree, Carden relocated to New York City, where she joined the musical comedy company Venus Rising and appeared in Seven Hearts, a 2001 musical set among friends in San Francisco. The following year she directed, produced, and starred in a holiday production. During this period she also worked as a full-time nanny for actor Bill Hader and his then-wife Maggie Carey, with whom she maintains a close relationship. A friend's invitation to a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre drew her into improvisational comedy; she began training with UCB in 2004 and later toured with the UCB Touring company. By 2010, performing under her married surname Carden, she was a cast member of The Ride, an interactive show staged on New York City tour buses. She married producer Jason Carden on July 31, 2010, having met him on a trip to Disneyland with mutual friends. In 2013, the couple relocated from New York City to Los Angeles, the same year Carden co-created and co-starred in Terrible Babysitters, a web original series about two parents searching for a babysitter.

Carden built a substantial television profile through recurring roles across multiple series. She played Gemma in the Comedy Central series Broad City from 2014 to 2019, a show created by fellow UCB alumni Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson. Guest appearances followed in Inside Amy Schumer in 2015, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in 2016, and Veep in 2017. Beginning in 2016, she starred as Janet, a live virtual assistant, in the NBC sitcom The Good Place alongside Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, a role she held through the series' conclusion in 2020. Her work on the show earned her a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series as well as a nomination for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. From 2018 to 2023, she held a recurring role as Natalie Greer in the HBO dark comedy-crime series Barry, which also stars Hader, and was nominated alongside the cast for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in both 2018 and 2019. In 2020, she appeared in the Quibi mystery-comedy series Mapleworth Murders. In 2022, she starred as first baseman Greta Gill in the Prime Video comedy-drama A League of Their Own, directed by Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham and based on the 1992 film of the same name.

Carden's film work includes a role as Jessica in the comedy-drama Other People in 2016, appearances in the dark comedy Greener Grass and the romantic comedy Let It Snow, both in 2019, and a role in the drama Bombshell, also released in 2019. Earlier film credits include the parody iSteve and the romantic comedy The To Do List, both from 2013.

On April 20, 2023, Carden made her Broadway debut playing Alicia in The Thanksgiving Play, written by Larissa FastHorse and directed by Rachel Chavkin. The production earned her a Theatre World Award in 2023. In 2024, SmartLess Media launched WikiHole, a podcast hosted by Carden in which a panel of comedians explores interconnected Wikipedia topics. That same year, Carden was announced as a lead cast member in the comedy series Sunny Nights.