The premise of Carol & The End of the World is a bit unconventional for an animated comedy. The miniseries, which hit Netflix on Dec. 15, picks up some time after people have learned that the end of the world is imminent. Another planet is hurtling straight towards Earth, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do but try to make the best of their last seven months. Rather than devolve into depressed messes or fruitlessly try to combat the inevitable, most people embrace their greatest whims and pleasures. Well, almost everyone.
[Warning: Spoilers ahead for Carol & The End of the World.]
Carol Kohl, a 42-year-old creature of habit, struggles to embrace her hedonistic side. Her parents, who have opened up their marriage and are heading on a cruise, voice their worries about her. Her sister, who sends videos of her adrenaline-pumping global adventures, takes Carol out on a camping trip and attempts to cajole her into embracing her wild side. In a particularly memorable moment from the premiere, Carol tries to pay her credit card statement, but the CEO of the bank sends her a personalized letter imploring her to just live.
“I did relate to Carol not cutting loose,” Martha Kelly, who voices Carol, told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed during a video interview earlier this month. “I used to drink, and even when I would drink I was not the kind of person who cut loose, danced, and went wild. I’m very inhibited, so I really related to that.”
Carol moves through her day-to-day with almost infuriating patience. She’s comfortable in her life and doesn’t feel the urge to majorly shake it up in the face of impending death. The only thing missing for her seems to be work, which everyone has given up on. When Netflix announced the series back in October, creator Dan Guterman (of Rick and Morty fame) referred to it as “a love letter to routine,” a solid basis for most comedies. Carol revels in the monotony of her everyday tasks and finds herself at a loss when those rhythms begin to slip away.
And then, something amazing happens: Carol follows a put-together woman on the subway into a skyscraper and, amongst the abandoned floors, finds a fully functional office still working away amidst the end of the world. Carol happily accepts her new role as an administrative assistant at the mysterious organization.
Kelly chalks Carol’s embrace of the job (also known as “The Distraction”) to the need for “anti-anxiety busyness,” but that’s where many of the similarities between the actress and Carol end.
“I also have had many office jobs, so I don’t think that if the world was ending I would personally want to work in an office again,” Kelly said, citing how “weird” it can be to stay indoors all day.
The switch from office to television has been both very sudden and a long time coming. If you don’t recognize Kelly’s signature voice from shows like The Great North, you’ve probably seen her face at some point since the start of 2022. Over the past two years, she has given memorable performances in everything from comedies like Hacks and What We Do in the Shadows to dramas including Gaslit and Euphoria. All of her characters make use of her neutral, matter-of-fact delivery, which often serves as a startling juxtaposition to the lines that she’s relaying. This is never more clear than in her villainous monologue in Euphoria (which earned her an Emmy nod for Outstanding Guest Actress), but it also extends to her work in Carol & the End of the World, as the series progresses and Carol’s world starts to open up.
As a longtime stand-up comedian, acting had always been in the back of Kelly’s mind. She’d wanted to be an actress in high school, and then by the time she got to college, she realized that she wanted to do stand-up.
“Like I said, I’m inhibited, so there’s no way I could have just started going to auditions,” she said. “I would’ve died.”
Kelly got her major television break in 2016 thanks to her friend Zach Galifianakis, whom she met at an open mic. They stayed in touch—even through his Hangover success, which surprised her. He had “catapulted into this stratosphere of celebrity”—and then, in 2014, he left a voicemail asking if she wanted to be on a TV show.
“When I called him back and we talked, he told me about Baskets,” Kelly recalled. “I first said, ‘I can’t act. I don’t know how to act. I don’t have any experience.’ And he said, ‘You don’t have to, you can just say the lines like you would talk in real life.’”
Unsure if that would work, Kelly ultimately agreed, hoping to at least get one season out of the show. She was living with her parents and working for an online proofreading company and hoped that a year’s work on TV could help her save up enough to move back to Austin and start a pet-sitting business. The FX comedy, wherein Kelly played Martha Brooks, the deadpan insurance agent-turned-friend of Galifianakis’ down-on-his-luck rodeo clown character, was a hit. One season turned into four, and then a part in Marriage Story, and finally her Euphoria role, which cemented her place and versatility in the television ecosystem.
“The comedy stuff that I’ve gotten to do, starting with Baskets and episodic TV, it is like you’re opening a present when you get a script,” she said. “And I can’t believe I get to do this.”
In a way, Kelly is already embracing some of her wildest hopes and dreams by finally acting. But if a planet were actually hurtling towards Earth, she has a couple of things she might try.
“I might do stuff that is really adventurous, that I’m too scared to do, if I knew [that the world was ending],” Kelly shared. “Like skydiving, I would never do, because I don’t want to die. But if it’s like you’re gonna die in seven months anyway, I would try stuff like that or paragliding, just adventurous stuff.”
Carol, too, comes to embrace these impulses in a way—at least in her mind—during the final few episodes. In the especially intriguing penultimate surfing episode (which wound up being one of Kelly’s favorites), viewers see her imagined wild pursuits. And even in Carol’s real day-to-day office life, she accepts this mortality via attachment and connection to her coworkers, even with the guarantee that it will inevitably end in devastation.
“When you’re a kid and a teenager—even in my twenties—before your brain finishes developing, you don’t really understand that you’re mortal,” Kelly said. “And so you do stuff that just seems fun and the danger doesn’t register. And then once you’re an adult, and know what it’s like to get hurt, you kind of shy away from a lot of stuff that’s dangerous. So that’s what I would do.”