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Barry Berkman | Criminals | Hollywood | Other Characters

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Barry Berkman/Barry Block

"I should just go blow my brains out 'cause there no hope for me, right? My soul's fucked because I was ordered to kill someone and I did it? You know, it doesn't make me a psycho."

Portrayed By: Bill Hader

"You wanna know what I'm good at? I'm good at killing people. You know, when I got back from Afghanistan I, ah, was really depressed. You know, like I didn't leave my house for months, and, ah, this friend of my dad's, he's, uh, he's like an uncle to me. He, uh, he helped me out and he gave me a purpose. He told me that, that what I was good at over there could be useful here and, uh, it's a job. You know. All right the money's good, and, uh, these people I take out, like they're, they're bad people, you know, like they're pieces of shit. Um... But lately, you know I've like, I'm not sleeping and, ah, that depressed feeling's back, you know. Like like I know there's more to me than that. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe there's not. Maybe this is all I'm good at."

A depressed low-rent hitman who discovers a passion for acting while on an assignment in Los Angeles.

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A-L

• Abusive Parents: Both he and Sally neglect their son John and deprive him of a normal childhood for their own benefit; special mention goes to Barry drilling him with videos of Little League fatalities to discourage him from playing baseball and possibly blowing their cover. In fact, by telling John how to suppress his anger under the auspices of being "mature", and teaching him that good men can be flawed in case John ever finds out about his past, Barry may have repeated his own dad's mistakes and created another version of himself in his child.
• Achilles in His Tent: All of his attempts to carve a new, normal life for himself only lead to him digging himself deeper into the murderous underworld of LA.
• Affably Evil: Barry does not want to kill people, nor is he especially sadistic and he is capable of being very friendly and genuinely kind and caring, but he's still a murderer who will kill innocents if it means protecting himself and his secrets.
• Alliterative Name: Barry Berkman, and even his actor name, Barry Block.
• AM/FM Characterization: He's shown to be a fan of Metallica. He has a poster of the band in their early years in his apartment in the first episode and he listens to their song "The Unforgiven" in the first episode of Season 3 while looking for work online.
• Anti-Villain: Gradually subverted. Barry initially comes off as a sympathetic Hitman with a Heart who simply wants to leave his life of crime behind, but is forced back into it by extenuating circumstances. However, it becomes becomes clear that Barry's remorse for his crimes and desire for a new life are self-centered, and that he's still willing to kill innocent people in order to save his own skin. He's still a tragic figure, but an increasingly unsympathetic one.
• Apologetic Attacker: By nature, since he dislikes killing. When it comes to killing Chris, he doesn't apologize, but his expression shows his reluctance and remorse.
• Arc Words: "Starting...now!" throughout season 1 — whenever he thinks he's leaving his past for good.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: Barry's apartment at the start of the series is devoid of all personality and decoration, except a Metallica poster above the bed. He is also a very conservative dresser, favoring utilitarian clothing in dark and neutral colors.
• The Atoner: Deconstructed. Barry does genuinely feel terrible for what he's done and wants to leave the life behind, but in the end, it's the selfish kind of atonement that's based around how he feels rather than making it up to the victims, and it never clicks that if he really wanted to make it up to people, he'd simply turn himself in. All the while, innocents like Chris and Janice pay the price for his refusal to give up, and he never accepts the fact that his actions were still his own.
• Attention Whore: A big driving force for Barry is to have the attention and love of those around him. He is first lured to Gene's acting class by the positive audience reaction to his (incredibly poor) performance, and he gradually grows addicted to the feeling of admiration and adoration from others.
• Awful Wedded Life: Come "it takes a psycho", he's finally living out his fantasy of a marriage with Sally, but it's shown to be an utterly miserable existence, especially for Sally, that Barry just convinces himself is what he's always wanted.
• Ax-Crazy: By Season 3, Barry's mental state has degraded to the point where he's become much more violent and prone to explosive outbursts at the drop of a hat. The season even opens with him coldly murdering a client for wanting to spare his victim, declaring that the victim can't be forgiven.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Despite his love for acting, he's utterly terrible at it and most of his line readings are flat and emotionless. He's only actually able to act when he's forced to confront his own sins.
• Bad Liar: Despite the fact that he keeps his darker side hidden from the likes of Sally and Gene for awhile, Barry is repeatedly shown to not actually be very good at on-the-spot lying or making up of excuses. Most characters around him are just so caught up in their own egos that they fail to see the signs.
• Beard of Evil: He grows a beard from Season 3 onwards, and he becomes increasingly cruel and malicious from that point forwards.
• Beard of Sorrow: Barry's gradually decaying mental state is visualized over the series by his facial hair. He begins the series cleanly shaven, develops a stubble in season 2, which by season 4 has become a short beard as he's in jail and barely clinging on to sanity.
• Being Evil Sucks: At the start of the series, it's shown that Barry reaps very few benefits from his criminal lifestyle: he's friendless, dateless, and living in a shithole apartment in the Midwest; his handler rips him off financially and abuses him emotionally; he's suffering from guilt, depression and PTSD, and feels like his life lacks any meaning.
• Berserk Button: Anything that threatens or harms the people he cares about—or worse, harms their perception of Barry—earns his immediate ire and passionate, murderous rage.
• Better Living Through Evil: Averted. Barry does make good money from murder, but Fuches tends to reap the benefits and is miserly enough to frequently stiff Barry on accommodations for his work.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Barry is a shy, introverted man who doesn't say much, but he's also an efficient, deadly hitman and former Marine and he can be very terrifying when angered.
• Blatant Lies: Early in Season 1, he has a habit of responding to inquiries from Fuches with an emphatic, exaggerated "Yes.", only for a Smash Cut to reveal he was lying through his teeth and the answer was absolutely not in the affirmative.
• Book Dumb: Hader himself has described Barry as "not a very deep thinker." He doesn't know how to do much other than kill people and play video games and he's easily mislead and manipulated. While homeschooling John, his main source of information seems to be clickbait YouTube videos of historical funfacts.
• Boom, Headshot!: Ultimately how he goes out, courtesy of Gene.
• Boring, but Practical: His CQC skills aren't nearly as impressive to look at as Ronny's martial arts, but he still manages to win their fight by using them to bust his windpipe.
• Broken Ace: To some, he's a war hero or badass hitman. To others, he's a loving boyfriend or surrogate son. But Barry is, truthfully, a broken man who values his own twisted take on happiness above anything else, and is more pathetic than cool.
• Broken Pedestal: Barry weaponizes this when raising John. He seems to regular build up heroes of history, like Abraham Lincoln, as great men for John to look up to, only to then reveal the not-so-savory facts about these same people and their "tricky legacies". It seems to be something of a conscious effort by Barry to prepare his son for the eventuality where he learns that his father is an insane, homicidal maniac with a dark past, yet still deserves idolization.
• Choke Holds: He puts a lethal one on Paco after a short chase.
• Churchgoing Villain: A very dark version after the time skip, as he's begun to attend sermons by megachurch pastors on YouTube with his family — not for political or theological reasons, but because he appears to need assurance for how a man can kill for wrath's sake and still be a good, moral person. When Cousineau indirectly intrudes back into his life, Barry wants to kill him for no real reason other than pure revenge, even though it endangers his family, and spends the drive listening to different priests' podcasts until he finds one that gives him the ideological justification to do so.
• Clark Kenting: Post time skip, he has changed his look to include a more "mature" fashion and dons a pair of glasses in an attempt to better hide his identity. A more literal example than many in that Barry actually renames himself "Clark", possibly in a direct reference to Superman.
• Cloudcuckoolander: As the series goes on and his mental state deteriorates, Barry grows increasingly unhinged and even downright psychotic at times, playing out long, in-depth delusions both in his own head and involving others.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Expect a "fuck"-ridden rant anytime he's considerably inconvenienced. It will range from colorful usage of the word in an insult, to just repeating the word to himself furiously.
• Combat Pragmatist: As a former Marine, Barry fights with the same mindset and uses any advantage he can get in a fight and has no issue with using dirty tricks to come out ahead.
• Comically Missing the Point: He's a regular victim of this, but a notable instance is in "the wizard", where he listens to a variety of religious podcasts in an attempt to justify his intended murder of Gene to himself and find a "sign". When each podcast successively informs him that murder of the kind he is planning is not ok, he just keeps ignoring them and changing podcasts until he finds one that aligns with his views, completely missing the fact that, if God truly operated how he believes He does, all of these previous podcasts would be the "signs" telling him to stop what he's planning.
• Contract on the Hitman: The Chechen mafia order his death several times throughout season 1, up until Barry kills most of them in the season finale. It happens again in Season 4 when Hank dispatches a pair of podcasters to take out Barry in prison.
• The Corruptible: It's left ambiguous when Barry developed his violent tendencies, as flashbacks show he was always rather prone to it, but his experiences during the Afghanistan War - where his comrades praised his skills at killing - and Fuches's subsequent manipulation are what set him on the path of becoming a hitman.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Not in reality—at first—but he tries to act like one at a party with Sally, thinking it makes him look more assertive and cool. It actually ends up sabotaging their relationship.
• Deadpan Snarker: He's prone to making blunt and sarcastic statements, often whenever his associates are behaving stupidly.
• Death Equals Redemption: After spending the entire series chasing redemption, Barry finally decides to turn himself in to the police—only to be killed by Gene, who at this point has been (falsely) accused of being the mastermind behind Janice's murder. By John's teen years, Barry has been laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, with everyone perceiving him as having been a Tragic Hero who was manipulated by Gene when the opposite was the case.
• Death Glare: Gives a particularly eerie and disturbing one.
• Death by Irony: In the series finale, he is shot in the head and killed by Gene, right as he decides to turn himself in to the police to clear Gene's name after learning that he is being blamed for Barry's crimes.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Hitman with a Heart. Yes, Barry is sympathetic, but he's trapped in a profession that doesn't leave much room for a heart of any kind (not to mention a profession that a truly moral person wouldn't take up in the first place). The first season partly goes with the standard plot of a criminal trying to leave his past behind, but as the series goes on it becomes apparent that Barry was a career criminal for a reason. He's unstable, maladjusted, and seemingly inherently violent, and was even before he became a hitman.
• Desperately Craves Affection: One of his core motivations. Barry has never felt like he's belonged anywhere, so once he finds people who are willing to accept who he is (beside the murderer part), he desperately wants to keep it.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: At the start of the series, Barry is desperate for any kind of greater purpose beyond killing people for Fuchs and finds it in acting.
• Dirty Coward:
  • This is the cause of most of the series' conflict. Barry would do anything to make things right, except face justice for his actions. He murders Chris and Janice just to cover his ass.
  • When Albert confronts him at gunpoint in S3E8, Barry drops to the ground and starts crying like a little girl while begging for his life.
• Disappointed by the Motive: He's clearly disappointed and confused when he realizes Loach isn't after him to avenge Janice's death, but to get revenge on his wife's new boyfriend.
• Disproportionate Retribution: When Sally's show gets cancelled by Diane, Barry offers to pay Diane back. Sally assumes this means some petty annoyance, only for Barry to spell out that he intends to swap her dog with another dog, constantly downsize her furniture, and engage in other mentally torturous activities until Diane kills herself. Sally is, unsurprisingly, mortified by the suggestion.
• The Dog Bites Back: After everything with Chris and Goran, Barry finally has enough and punches the manipulative Fuches right in his smug face.
• Domestic Abuse: Not to the point of full-on physicality (yet), but Barry's relationship with Sally declines over the series to the point that he's verbally abusing her in public and shrieking in rage at her if she disappoints him.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You:
  • In the season 1 finale, Barry knows he will win a shootout with Janice should one ensue, so he begs her to back off and forget he's a hitman.
  • In "ronny/lily", Barry seems to genuinely want to avoid hurting Ronny at first, almost pleading with the man to pack his things and get out of the city so that Barry doesn't have to carry out a hit on him.
• The Dreaded: Fuches, the Bolivians, the Burmese, and the Chechens are utterly terrified when a bloodthirsty Barry arrives at their celebration. In Season 3, Cousineau and Sally become scared of him as he starts to act more unhinged and abusive towards them. Season 4's "it takes a psycho" takes this to its arguably greatest extent yet, in that Barry is hardly even in the episode, yet nearly every character is scared shitless that he's broken out of prison. Cousineau even accidentally shoots his own son out of paranoia that Barry was coming to get him.
• Egocentrically Religious: He turns to Christianity following the Time Skip, but he uses it to assure himself that he's a good person despite his crimes rather than genuinely believing in it. Best summed up when he returns to kill Gene and searches for Christian podcasts that assure him his acts are acceptable rather than just blatantly trying to save his own ass.
• Establishing Character Moment: Barry's first scene in the show sees him dejectedly leaving the scene of his latest crime (after patting himself for keys, guns, and wallet in a rote, unthinking fashion), showing his emotional numbness and his dissatisfaction with his job.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Due to the fact that Fuches practically raised him, Barry has a lot of affection for the man. It becomes more complicated as their partnership transforms into a rivalry, but Barry does still have stray moments of apparent care towards Fuches.
  • He considers Gene a friend, and is downright horrified by the fact that Gene's perception of him could be damaged by the truth about Janice's death. Even once Gene learns the truth, Barry still tries to make amends and maintain a relationship with his acting coach, up until Gene plays Barry into getting arrested, at which point Barry seems to lose a lot of his feelings for Gene. Tragically, in the series finale after learning that Gene is being falsely accused for his own crimes, Barry decides to turn himself in and redeem himself to clear Gene's name, only for him to shoot Barry in the head.
  • He cares deeply for Sally, to such a point that it's his love for her that prevents him from killing Esther until the Season 2 finale. He proves to value her above all else, as he betrays everyone—even Fuches and Hank—in his quest to be with her.
  • Later on, he's shown to genuinely love his son John, having a very close relationship with him while doing everything he can to make sure John becomes a much better person than he ever was, though Barry doesn't take his feelings into account and ends up causing him to develop emotional issues without realizing it.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He claims he won't kill kids and bluntly refuses Fuches's order to murder Lily, though it doesn't stop him from threatening Gene's grandson.
  Barry: Fuck you, I'm not killing her, man!
  • Early on in "Chapter Two: Use It", he becomes uncomfortable with Sally wanting perform a scene from Doubt at Ryan's memorial when he realizes it's a very serious play about pedophilia.
• Evil Feels Good: The reason he became a hitman in the first place was because during his tour of duty, his murders gained him the praise of his fellow soldiers and he was essentially chasing that high through Fuches. By the time of the first season though, the luster has worn off.
• Extreme Doormat: Perhaps Barry's greatest obstacle is his own inability to stand up for himself. Whenever he tries to assert himself, he usually ends up backing down. This is especially apparent with Fuches, who is aware that even when Barry is pushed to the point where he actually yells, all Fuches needs to do is carry on with the assumption that Barry will bend to his will.
• Expy: As highlighted by the numerous references to Macbeth through the first season, Barry is one to the eponymous Villain Protagonist. Both are mentally ill soldiers who, upon returning home, find themselves manipulated into becoming murderers by a manipulative family member (Lady Macbeth for Macbeth and Fuches for Barry). And like Macbeth, Barry becomes increasingly malevolent as he continues to pursue his ambitions irregardless of how much it hurts the people around him in the hopes of finding happiness.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Selfishness. For all of his regret and angst about being a hitman, Barry is unable to truly do the right thing and turn himself in. He kills Chris and Janice to save his own ass, and even almost kills Gene before even considering turning himself in.
  • Wrath. Barry's inability to control his violent temper causes many problems for him throughout the series, down to the series finale being set in motion by him risking his new life and anonymity by going back to LA to murder Gene in revenge for turning him in.
  • Ultimately, his core failing is that he is unable to deal with his emotions in a healthy way, which often leads him to acting out violently, even to people he cares about.
  • Denial. Barry is in serious denial about his evil nature and believes he can become a good person without actually meaningfully accepting or atoning for his misdeeds and instead desperately tries to find ways to convince himself that he's actually a good person without taking responsibility for the bad things he's done.
• Faux Affably Evil: He devolves into this by Season 4. He's still polite and mild-mannered, but beneath it he's utterly ruthless and his behavior has become increasingly abusive.
• The Fettered: At first, being a hitman was able to distract Barry from his PTSD, but over time it just worsened his depression.
• First Injury Reaction: Downplayed, as Barry isn't unfamiliar with injury (getting beaten up hand to hand and stabbed with a kitchen knife among other things). But despite pouring boxes of bullets into various enemies over the series, Barry doesn't get shot himself until he takes one to the shoulder in the last episode; he flops into a chair, looks bemusedly at his own blood, and simply says "Oh, wow." Also his last words, as Gene delivers the coup de grace.
• Freak Out: After he kills Chris to keep him from ratting to the police, he loses control of his emotions, hallucinates, and eventually starts screaming and smashing furniture. When Albert confronts him about Chris' murder in the Season 3 finale, he collapses into a sobbing, screaming mess.
• Freudian Excuse: Barry's service in Afghanistan where he was frequently praised for his skill at killing, the resulting PTSD and depression he developed, and Fuches's manipulations all played a role in shaping him into the ruthless killer he is today.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: While Barry was manipulated and preyed upon by a man he viewed as a father figure who took advantage of his troubled mental state for his own benefit, he still went along with him and killed numerous people for years and his actions in Los Angeles show he is willing to continue doing it even without Fuches' prompting, both of which he refuses to meaningfully acknowledge and take responsibility for. During their confrontation, Janice even cuts through his excuses by pointing out he's still a murderer.
• From Camouflage to Criminal: Barry is a former US Marine who returned from Afghanistan with severe depression and PTSD, with Fuches manipulating him into becoming a hitman.
  Barry: He [Fuches] told me that, that what I was good at over there could be useful here and, uh, it's a job.
• Genius Ditz: Downplayed. Bill Hader often describes Barry as a version of this. Barry is very good at what he does. However, outside of killing and showing some promise as an actor, he doesn’t appear to be capable of introspection or grasping more complex subjects like morality. It takes until the series finale for him to finally accept that he’s a terrible person before being abruptly shot by Cousineau.
• Groin Attack: He once stabbed a guy in the balls, which he brings up to Goran as a selling point (at Fuches' urging, of course). Goran is just weirded out by this, and Barry instantly regrets bringing it up.
• Hallucinations: He starts to have these more and more frequently as the series goes on, ranging from mild daydreams that he snaps out of with ease to full-on delusions that he spends entire episodes indulging in.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Not at first, but as Season 3 and 4 move along, Barry begins to get angry far more often and throws tantrums, which often leads to violence.
• He Knows Too Much: He targets several people because of this, from Chris to Janice. He takes it even further when he goes after Janice's father, and in "tricky legacies", he ends the episode noting that he's now going to have to bump off Gene.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Gene kills Barry right as he accepts that he can only redeem himself by turning himself in.
• Heel–Face Turn: Barry is a deconstruction of this trope. What happens when someone tries to make an honest turn from evil to good, but still carries all of their negative personality traits with them? The answer: an evil person’s decision to try to do good will be warped by their evil nature. While Barry does genuinely want to be an actor and leave his shitty life of murder behind, his motivations are entirely based around how he feels instead of remorse over the damage he's caused to other people. Multiple characters confront Barry on how his evil is unforgivable and if he actually felt any remorse, he'd turn himself in. His response? Kill them to protect himself. This includes innocent people like Chris and Janice. All the while, Barry keeps clinging to the delusion that his life is good and that he doesn't need to pay for anything he's done. Essentially, Barry is what happens when a genuinely evil person tries to do good without understanding the depth of the pain they caused other people and when their desire to change is built more around self-regard than remorse.
  • Ironically, Barry ends up dying in the series finale right as he finally decides to make a genuine choice to do this for real.
• Heel Realization: Zig-Zagged, as Barry has a few of these along the way, not that it stops him from doing what he does. When he finally decides to attempt and redeem himself by turning himself in...Gene shoots him dead.
• Hidden Badass: He's a meek and mild-mannered guy who also happens to be a natural born killing machine. Played with in that his talent for violence is rarely if ever framed as being cool, and Barry himself is miserable over the idea that killing people is the only thing he's good at.
• Hidden Depths: He’s a contract killer that desires to become a famous actor. Also interestingly, despite not shown to be religious in the first three seasons, Barry dreams of some sort of afterlife waiting for him. While he might not believe in Heaven, he seems to believe in a Hell. In Season 3, he’s shown to be terrified of death since he thinks he’s going there.
• Hidden Weapons: He hangs a gun from a tree before dealing with Moss, knowing he will have to kill her if he can't convince her to let him go.
• Hiding Behind Religion: In season 4, he claims it's God's plan for him to avoid jail.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: In-universe. Barry was a disturbed, violent, and deeply flawed man, but — because the world at large believes Cousineau is responsible for the murders, not to mention Gene's own self-aggrandizing account of mentoring a vulnerable lost soul — the actionized biopic The Mask Collector depicts him as a noble hero who was betrayed by the heartless and manipulative man he once idolized.
• Hitman with a Heart: Being a Professional Killer doesn't make him any less emotional or sympathetic. It helps that he doesn't like being a hitman and genuinely wants to leave his criminal past behind. It's deconstructed as he becomes more unhinged.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Barry holds Sally and Cousineau, two exceptionally shallow and conceited people who generally put themselves before anyone else, in high regard, and continues to allow himself to fall under Fuches' control despite recognizing him as the source of many of his problems.
• Hypocrite: He's one in many, many ways, but some standouts are his outrage at Hank's "betrayal" of him in "you're charming" when Barry betrayed him first, and the sequence in "tricky legacies" where he remarks that John doesn't "need" something like a comforter and should be content, only to then spend unnecessary money on a pointless book for himself.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: He viscously berates Sally in "limonanda" over her refusal to give Gene a part in her show, accusing her of not caring about Gene's well-being and being content to let him suffer when she's finally achieved the success she desires. Barry himself spends the entire episode ignoring Gene's wellbeing as he keeps him hostage in the boot of his car, his entire scheme to get Gene work itself being motivated by Barry's need to absolve himself of guilt rather than altruism. Regardless, he does ultimately have a point: Sally is in a position to help Gene get work and simply chooses not to, weakly blaming the casting director for the problem.
• I Did What I Had to Do: He regularly tries to rationalize his heinous actions this way. In "the wizard", he spends most of the episode listening to religious podcasts in an attempt to relate his own intentions of murdering Gene in cold blood to Biblical cases of justified murder.
• Ignored Confession: In the series premiere, after Cousineau won't accept him as a student, Barry tells him about why he became a hitman and how acting is his chance to do something different with his life. Cousineau thinks the story was an improvised monologue. He's suitably impressed and later retells it to his girlfriend Janice, which makes her realize that Barry is the murderer she's been trying to catch all season.
• Ignored Epiphany: A recurring theme is Barry having a Heel Realization that he's a terrible person and then reverting back to form the second he actually has to face consequences for his actions. By the fourth season, he starts actively ignoring them. While contemplating whether to kill Gene, he listens to various religious podcasts to find one which justifies murder while ignoring any that point out that it's wrong.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Barry would really like nothing more than to be the well-meaning patriarch of a whitebread nuclear family ... although he'd also really like to be an Oscar-winning actor. Really, you could probably sum up Barry's case as being "I Just Want To Be Anything Other than a Hitman."
• Imagine Spot: He has frequent fantasies of being a world-famous actor and having a conventional nuclear family with Sally. In a less pleasant example, his guilt at killing Chris causes him to imagine Chris's family reacting to the news of his death.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: He is an excellent shot, with his very first kill involving him taking out three people at 700 yards. His fellow Marines, who told him to shoot thinking Barry would miss, are left flabbergasted. Hank even compliments Barry’s marksmanship after he realizes he shot Akhmal in the exact same spot he was shot.
• Inelegant Blubbering: He dissolves into a bawling, hysterical mess after killing Chris (which then inadvertently helps him deliver a great performance during the class's Shakespeare showcase).
• Innocently Insensitive: He tries to comfort Sally after Joplin is cancelled by offering to gaslight the executive responsible into insanity. This understandably freaks her out, much to Barry's confusion.
• The Insomniac: He has trouble sleeping as a result of his guilt and depression.
• It's All About Me: While Barry is certainly capable of sincerely caring about others, it's also shown that when he is forced to choose he will look out for himself first and foremost. His desire to go straight makes him believe he can and should be allowed to avoid any consequence for his previous actions, and he'll readily resort to murder in order to protect himself, as Chris and Janice find out.
  • Even his attempt at redemption with Gene in Season 3 is inherently self-centered as he is focused only on what will make him feel better and not what would be better for Gene who just wants Barry to leave him and his family alone.
  • Taken further than ever in Season 4. Barry finally gets exactly what he's always wanted, having an isolated married life with Sally and raising a kid, which is seemingly a noble goal. In truth, Barry showcases that his idea of "happiness" is controlling them both to suit his twisted ideal of a "family", uncaring of either's comfort or mental state so long as his son idolizes Barry.
• Jerkass Has a Point: He frequently acts like a Jerkass towards Hank, who thinks highly of Barry and puts himself at risk to help him. However, considering Hank ends up trying to kill him more than once, overcomplicates his hits with overly dramatic gestures and keeps pulling him further into a life of crime he actively wants to leave, Barry's dislike of Hank isn't totally unjustified.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: In the first season, Barry is a hitman but he comes across as rather sympathetic. He's polite, has had his mental illness exploited by Fuches, and only recently realized he's been killing innocent people. However, during the first season finale he murders both Chris and Janice to evade justice, and from there increasingly descends into depravity.
• Just Following Orders: Barry's attempted defense of Macbeth, and by extension, his defense for his own murderous activities.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Though it's in the heat of a bloodlusted rampage, Barry's utterly ruthless execution of his best pupil, Mayrbek, during his shooting spree is a considerably cruel moment which he doesn't even give a second thought to. Made worse in that Barry is only able to take the shot in the first place because Mayrbek hesitates, meanwhile Barry doesn't give two shits and immediately kills him.
  • In "yikes", a prison guard tries to show Barry a little bit of empathy and understanding. Barry, in a moment of self-loathing, cruelly informs the man that he's a cop killer who would murder the guard's entire family if given a chance which causes the guard to beat on Barry in response.
  • In "tricky legacies", Barry responds to John's pleas for a comforter, as his room gets cold at night, by telling him "God will provide what you need. Don't complain." Only to then immediately reveal he has bought himself an unneeded book on Abraham Lincoln because it's his current hobby.
• Lack of Empathy: A very notable part of Barry's character that shines through as the series progresses. Whether it's his mental issues or selfishness at play, Barry often shows a fundamental inability to properly empathize and connect with other human beings on a personal level, and will sometimes go so far as to be offended that they dare expect him to consider their feelings on matters.
  • One of the best examples of this is in "you're charming", where Barry calls up Hank and demands he pull off an assassination for him. This in the midst of Barry ratting Hank out to the feds, and when Hank calls him out on this, Barry flies into a rage that Hank isn't just doing as he's told, unable to accept that Hank would, of course, be very upset with him for the betrayal.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Season 3 is basically an extended sequence of this. He has practically no allies left and a veritable army coming after him consisting of the families of his past targets and other people he's killed to keep up his disguise of normalcy. Unlike most examples, it comes across as horrifying rather than cathartic, as this was all deliberately instigated by Fuches, the one who turned him into a killer in the first place. It culminates with him being abandoned by Sally (for a time at least), and manipulated by Gene into getting himself caught and arrested for his many crimes (again, for a time).
• Laughably Evil: Even though he's a murderous, toxic person who is willing to threaten children to get his way, Barry is unfailingly hilarious with how socially awkward, out of touch, and downright desperate for attention he is.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Barry is most definitely not a good person, but unlike most members of LA's criminal underworld, he tries to avoid killing when unnecessary and desperately wants to wash his hands clean of a life of crime. It's subverted and deconstructed from Season 3 onwards, where he becomes increasingly unfettered and Fuches rightly calls him out for hypocritically acting like a bastion of morality.
• Loving a Shadow:
  • He projects a lot of things onto Sally in order to make her conform better to his perception of her as his Morality Pet than she actually does.
  • His relationship with Gene and Fuches also boils down to this. He views them as father figures, but ultimately he only holds them in high regard because they provide him with positive validation.

M-Y

• Madness Makeover: Barry becomes much more disheveled and worn-out by Season 3 as he begins to mentally and emotionally deteriorate. He looks more pale with bags under his eyes, his hair is messy while growing out an unkempt beard and his clothes look crumpled. Hank even lampshades at one point, noting he looks like shit.
• Manchild: Occasionally slips into this. He gets very excited by the prospect of working at a candy store (offscreen), his main hobby outside of work or acting seems to be playing video games, and he seems to have a very loose grasp on certain moral concepts, usually taking them at their most basic, black-and-white interpretation. In his more manic moments he comes off as a Psychopathic Manchild. His breakdown in front of Albert at the end of season 3 is made all the more unsettling by his loud wailing and screaming, which comes off as almost infantile.
• Made of Iron: Subverted, he takes a number of major beatings throughout "ronny/lily", and is forced to walk them all off, but he's visibly suffering from the blood loss and other injuries in-between.
• Murder-Suicide: He not-so-subtly threatens this to Sally in "the wizard", stating that if the movie about his life is made, he and Sally's best recourse is to drop their son off at an orphanage and kill themselves. Sally's initial hesitance to Barry hunting down Gene is pretty quickly overridden after this.
• Motive Decay: As his attempts to change continue to blow up in his face, Barry's sanity and well being begins to decline and he becomes even more unhinged and violent than before.
• Mutually Unequal Relationship: Hank views Barry as his best friend and goes out of his way to help him, even at great length to himself. Meanwhile, Barry views him as an annoyance at best and clearly couldn't care less about him.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • As he interacts more and more with normal people (well, actors) he starts to realize the full scope of his actions. Comes to a head after he kills Chris, prompting a serious Freak Out.
  • Barry most likely had one back in Korengal during his time in the army when he killed a civilian he mistook for an attacker.
  • Barry has a major one at the end of season 2 after he commits a mass murder of the united Bolivian-Chechen army just to get to Fuches, who manages to escape. He looks like he's about to burst into tears when he realizes he killed Mayrbek.
• Narcissist: While not as obvious in this regard as Gene and Sally, Barry is totally self-centered. While he is highly insecure and requires constant validation, he almost always portrays himself as a victim, downplays his own culpability, and ultimately deludes himself as a fundamentally "good and incorruptible" person. It's when his actions conflict with this view of himself that he really starts losing it. Hank even calls Barry this over their last phone call.
• Never My Fault: The moments that Barry can actually take responsibility for his crimes are few and far between. It's very noticeable in his final talk with Janice, where he says that he was manipulated into his life of crime; while this is true, it ignores that a fundamentally good person never would've gone along with it anyway, and by the end of the scene he's killed Janice with a gun he planted beforehand entirely of his own volition just to save himself.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • Barry disobeys Fuches and spares Taylor, a fellow Marine. Within the next two episodes Taylor's stupidity and hotheadedness has gotten him killed and the operation he botched means Barry, now a target for the Chechen mafia, is forced to murder his friend Chris.
  • In the series finale, after talking with Tom Barry decides to turn himself in to the police and clear Gene's name. Within seconds of making this decision, Gene shoots Barry dead on the spot.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Barry tries to pull this off with Janice when she finds out he's a hitman. It doesn't work.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Both his escape from a high-security prison, and his evasion from law enforcement to create an entirely new life with Sally that lasts for eight years, are not seen happening onscreen despite the immense talent both would take.
• Obliviously Evil: Barry believes his targets are all "pieces of shit," but, considering Fuches is feeding into this opinion, it's most likely not true. At any rate, the first job Barry is genuinely conflicted about is Ryan Madison, a wannabe actor whose only crime is sleeping with the wife of a Mafiya boss.
  • He's also a complicated example of this afterwards as Barry doesn't deny that he's done awful things but still thinks of himself as a fundamentally decent person who just made some mistakes and deserves a chance to create a new life for himself without paying for them. As the series goes on, his denial kicks into overdrive as he tries with increasing desperation to convince himself that he isn't a bad person.
• One-Man Army: Destroys almost all of the Chechen mob, the Bolivian army and the Burmese mafia by himself during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge in the season 2 finale. Notably, it's presented as being more frightening and upsetting than cool.
• Only Sane by Comparison: Barry struggles with mental illness and is a violent murderer, but he's much more pragmatic and strait-laced than most of his peers. Where Fuches is something of an impulsive moron and Goran and Hank are more focused on flashy aesthetics, Barry just wants to do his job efficiently and go home.
• Outlaw Couple: Becomes one with Sally following his breakout in "it takes a psycho".
• Pay Evil unto Evil: He believes this is what he's been doing as a hitman, but Fuches is not a reliable handler.
• Parents as People: Deconstructed rather harshly. Yes, Barry loves his son John and he doesn't want his son to end up like him. But he doesn't take John's feelings into account and controls his life to a point where his son has his own set of emotional problems.
• Plain Palate: His taste in food is extremely basic, another factor in his overall Manchild characterization. When asked what his favorite soup is during an acting exercise, he struggles to come up with any examples, awkwardly confessing that he only likes broth. When Sally orders dinner for him in season 3, she ends up getting him spaghetti from the kids' menu, specifically noting that carbonara is "too fancy".
• Professional Killer: Barry is a hitman by trade, and a very efficient one at that.
• Protagonist Title: It's Barry!
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Zig-zagged. He starts off as a hitman, but genuinely wants to leave the life behind and believes he's only been killing bad people. At first, he seems to be succeeding. But by season three, his dedication to leaving the life behind has led him to kill two innocent people and he's grown increasingly manic and violent. And he's still picking up odd jobs as a contract killer anyway, either for the cash or because he has no motivation to do anything else. Time will tell if this changes.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Barry takes no real pleasure in his job, and just wants to do his work as quickly as possible and go home. It's also deconstructed, since it's made clear that anyone who'd view being a hitman as an acceptable career path has to have something deeply wrong with them.
• Psychopathic Manchild: A lowkey and realistic example, but Barry appears to suffer from some form of arrested development, with Hader drawing inspiration from his own daughter's tantrums and describing Barry as "like a kid" in some interviews. He's not emotionally stable, as his fits of rage have the feel of childish tantrums with the anger and physical menace of a disturbed ex-soldier, and he constantly seeks validation from others that can be as simple as quasi-parental reassurances that he's not a bad person and he's doing okay.
• Reluctant Psycho: Barry is disturbed by his own propensity for murder, and the fact that he's frequently not bothered by having to commit it.
• Retired Monster: His primary motivation is to become this — i.e. to lead a quiet, unassuming existence while suffering no repercussions for his numerous crimes. He gets his wish after the time skip, only to then immediately jump back into his homicidal ways to silence Gene.
• Revenge Before Reason: He has the quiet life that he's always sought, and even has a kid with Sally. But once he learns that Gene is back and is consulting on a movie about him, he decides to murder him in revenge for his betrayal.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After Fuches frames Gene for Janice's murder, Barry finds him hiding out amongst the united Burmese and Chechen mafias. Barry, in a blind rage, ends up shooting and killing every one of them (except for Fuches and Hank).
• Sanity Slippage: While he was never the most stable individual, his sanity takes a significant nosedive following his rampage in the monastery in the season two finale. He gets worse over the course of season three, becoming increasingly delusional and prone to mood swings. By season four, he's a barely functioning emotional wreck who can barely control his freak outs; at one point, he even goads a prison guard into brutally beating him to a pulp.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: He lets out some shockingly high-pitched shrieks when confronted by Albert over his murder of Chris. It's an unusual case of this trope, as it shows just how stunted he is, making it more pathetic and disturbing than funny.
• Secretly Selfish: His efforts to help Gene overcome his grief over Janice's "disappearance" are clearly more about Barry trying to soothe his own guilt than any real altruism.
• Self-Harm: The further his mental state slips, the more prone he is to violently hurting himself out of sheer rage, from slapping his head repeatedly to punching walls until his hands are bloody.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: He's a former US Marine, and his main takeaway from his time in Afghanistan was PTSD and depression. He became a hitman, but has started to burn out and his depression has returned in full force.
• Shower of Angst: In the premiere episode he's seen taking a shower, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, clearly upset about the recent job or maybe just the turn his life has taken.
• Shrinking Violet: He's withdrawn and shy, and tends to blend into the background whenever he's off the job.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Over the course of season 1, his clothes become more fun and trendy as he loosens up and becomes more assertive thanks to the acting class.
• Sinister Suffocation: He kills Paco by strangling him to death when the initial attempts at sniping him take too long.
• Skewed Priorities: A major part of his character. He will put more focus, attention and passion into something as simple as rehearsing a line, than he will into murdering people or pulling off criminal jobs.
• Sociopathic Soldier: Of the "broken" type. As a Marine, he killed a trio of men with casual indifference just for being "suspicious" because his squad cheered him on, and he went on a shooting rampage when Albert was wounded, uncaring of possible innocent bystanders.
• The Stoic: He's extremely stoic and rarely expresses emotions, to the point he comes across as completely detached from human emotion. A lot of the reason for his poor acting is because Barry just genuinely seems unable to understand human interaction and fumbles through it.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Barry's usually a pretty calm and collected guy when it comes to his job. Sadly, a lot of the people he does business with are either hilariously incompetent or straight up idiots. It's not much better in his acting class though...
• Sympathetic Murderer: Barry has killed people, and there are probably some innocents mixed in among the professional criminals, but he's a likable guy and a meek pawn of a stronger, less sympathetic personality... until he kills Chris and Janice in the process of trying to walk away.
• Toxic Friend Influence: By Season 3, he has shown signs of this, influencing Sally and Gene to make some very morally questionable choices.
• Tragic Dream: Barry spends the entire story looking for redemption as he tries to leave his life of violence behind, but his continuously bad choices and his inability to overcome his flaws and accept actual responsibility for what he does ruins this for him at every turn. In the end, when he does finally decide to take responsibility and turn himself in for his crimes, Gene shoots him in the head.
• Tragic Villain: He's tired of murdering people and wants nothing more than to retire... unfortunately, since he doesn't want to go to prison, his path to a normal life is paved with even more murder. Even at when he's at his most unsympathetic, he's still rather pitiable since for as bad as he is, he's still a fundamentally broken human being struggling with severe mental illness. In the end, he ends up getting shot in the head by Gene right as he decides to finally do the right thing and turn himself in to the police.
• Trapped in Villainy: At first, Barry wants to get out of the criminal underworld but is pulled back in by both Fuches and the Chechen's machinations. This fades as he starts murdering innocent people to cover up his secret.
• Tranquil Fury: He displays this in episode 1 when he notices that the Chechens have shot Ryan and are preparing to shoot him, possibly overlapping with Dissonant Serenity. The mildly concerned way he says "What's goin' on, guys?" is more like that of a curious bystander intervening in a street argument.
• Troubled Abuser: Barry is a wounded, tragic person in desperate need of love — and yet, at the same time, extremely dangerous to be around. Even though he feels guilt and anguish whenever he hurts those he cares about, his flaws and inability to address them in a healthy way ensure that he can never achieve the happiness he desires: he's filled with psychotic rage and a propensity for violence, is often blind or apathetic to the discomfort of others, and he has a bloody past that follows him wherever he goes, which will always make him turn on people for self-preservation. This is shown in detail in his relationship with Sally, where he goes from a threatening, unpredictable boyfriend to an emotionally stunted husband and father.
• Villainous Breakdown: In episode 1-7, after Chris tells him that he's going to the police and that he didn't tell his wife he was going to meet Barry, Barry lashes out at him, and then completely shuts down emotionally.
  Barry: Why did you say that. WHY DID YOU SAY THAT?!
• Villain Protagonist: Starts off as a softer version of this. He's a Professional Killer, but a reluctant one who's trying to walk away to a better life. He becomes a true one after he kills Chris and Detective Moss, both complete innocents who were trying to do the right thing.
• Villains Want Mercy: After multiple seasons of killing anyone who crosses him, Barry faces his own potential demise at the hands of Albert by shrieking and pleading to not be shot on the spot.
• Villain with Good Publicity: After his death, he is now widely believed to be a victim at the hands of Gene. With an In-Universe movie depicting him as a sympathetic Tragic Hero.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: He's not above murdering innocent people, but he does, apparently, draw the line at killing children, as shown in "ronny/lily". Though in "limonada" he at least threatens to kill both Gene's adult son and young grandson if he doesn't keep quiet.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Views acting as the laid-back "ordinary" alternative to his self-destructive career as a hitman, despite acting infamously being an extremely insecure and stressful profession to be in. Justified in that Barry has been deep in the life of a killer for so long that he clearly has no real idea of what actually qualifies as an "ordinary" job. And in Barry's defense, even the stresses of an acting career are vastly preferable to those of a professional killer.
• Yandere: He has serious shades of this when it comes to Sally. He falls for her with almost childish ease, rearranges things so that a large chunk of his life revolves around her, gets violently protective and/or possessive over her, and is willing to betray each and every other person he once called an ally so as to have a life with her, simply because she said a single line to him about how "safe" he made her feel.

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“Oh wow.”

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