Dispatch • Inside 'Nobody Wants This': Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons, and Jackie Tohn on Love, Friendship, and the Art of Growing Up Late
At a panel on Dec. 14, the actors reflected on the onscreen friendships and marriages that give the Netflix rom-com its emotional weight
(Timothy Simons, Jackie Tohn, and Justine Lupe in Nobody Wants This. Source: Erin Simkin / Netflix)
On paper, Nobody Wants This is a romantic comedy about two people trying to love each other without losing themselves. In practice, what gives the Netflix series its emotional gravity, especially in its second season, is everything that unfolds just outside the central romance: the marriages under quiet strain, the friendships that blur into something more intimate, the people who learn how to support others long before learning how to ask for care themselves.
That tension—between what looks stable and what quietly isn’t—was very much on the minds of Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons, and Jackie Tohn when the show’s three supporting cast members gathered for a panel discussion following a screening in Los Angeles on Dec. 14. Moderated by The Hollywood Reporter contributing editor Stacey Wilson Hunt, the conversation unfolded less like a formal postmortem than a candid reckoning with adulthood: how relationships harden or soften, and how long it can take to admit that something you once chose isn’t quite right anymore.
Created by Erin Foster, Nobody Wants This follows Joanne (Kristen Bell), a sharp podcast host once allergic to tradition, and Noah (Adam Brody), a rabbi whose faith is deeply rooted in ritual. Across two seasons, the show traces their romance alongside a larger ecosystem of relationships shaped by family expectation, religious identity, and the quieter compromises of adulthood. The series earned major awards recognition again this year, including three Golden Globe nominations, among them Best Television Series—Musical or Comedy, as well as five Critics Choice Award nominations: nods for Lupe for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and Simons for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.
(The official trailer for Nobody Wants This Season 2. Source: Netflix / YouTube)
Lupe, whose character Morgan evolves the most dramatically over Season 2, said she knew early on that the character’s emotional arc would deepen in unexpected ways. Rather than discovering Morgan’s storyline on the page alone, Lupe was invited into the process before scripts were written.
“I went into the writers’ room with Kristen before the season began, and they kind of mapped out what was going to be happening with Morgan this season,” Lupe explained. What followed wasn’t one defining turn so much as a deliberate expansion of her role romantically, emotionally, and narratively. Morgan’s relationship with her therapist, Dr. Andy (Arian Moayed), initially reads as impulsive, even self-sabotaging, but Lupe saw it as a natural extension of the character’s instincts.
“That sounds very Morgan,” she said, laughing. “I was just excited to see what that looked like. And then, kind of every single twist and turn of the character and the amount of real estate they gave me to play with. I was just in awe.”
(Arian Moayed and Justine Lupe in Nobody Wants This. Source: Netflix)
Equally meaningful to Lupe was how the season reframed Morgan’s bond with Joanne. Their sisterhood, tested by jealousy and mismatched timing, becomes one of the show’s quiet anchors. “I liked the way that our friendship evolved,” Lupe said. “It lived up to all my expectations.”
For Simons, whose Sasha often occupies the margins as the affable listener, Season 2 offered something rarer: the chance to let Sasha’s easygoing steadiness finally crack. He noted that rom-coms often flatten supporting characters into functions—comic relief, moral compass, background noise—but TV’s longer runway allows for something messier and more human.
“When you have five hours of time and you’re into a second season, you get to learn,” Simons said. “You get to get involved more in their lives.”
(Adam Brody, Timothy Simons, Kristen Bell, and Jackie Tohn in Nobody Wants This. Source: Erin Simkin / Netflix)
One moment stood out for him in particular: a game of Go Deep in episode 9 (“Crossroads”), designed to spark honesty and surface conflict, when Sasha finally articulates how invisible he’s felt. “He’s been listening to everybody else’s problems for all of Season 1 and most of Season 2, and they don’t even know that he has stuff coming up,” Simons explained. “He’s like, ‘No, I’ve told all you guys this. Am I not important to you?’”
That imbalance, Simons suggested, mirrors a reality many adult friendships quietly drift into. “Sometimes these things get out of balance,” he added. “You’ve been friends for a really long time, but you haven’t asked me a single thing about what I’ve been dealing with.”
Tohn, whose character Esther undergoes perhaps the most disorienting transformation of the season, framed her character’s journey as something like a delayed reckoning. At the start of Season 2, Esther isn’t reacting to one specific rupture so much as the accumulated weight of a life lived on autopilot. “She’s on her ‘why is everybody else having such a good time and I’m not?’ journey—and then realizing that the answer is because of her,” Tohn explained.
(Justine Lupe, Kristen Bell, and Jackie Tohn in Nobody Wants This. Source: Erin Simkin / Netflix)
What emerges, she added, is less a rebellion than a second adolescence—impulsive, awkward, necessary. “She’s just been on the high-speed train,” Tohn said. “Cool mother-in-law, holidays, this, that, the other. And she’s rigid and not having a good time. So she’s like, ‘I’m getting bangs. I’m gonna go drink with my friends.’”
Tohn was candid about how unsettling it could be to watch Esther question a marriage that appears loving and functional from the outside. “I remember reading the scripts and being a little confused,” she said. “There’s this Valentine’s episode where they’re dancing together. It’s the sweetest thing. And then in the next episode she’s like, ‘Do I want this?’ And I was like, how could she not want this?”
But that confusion, she noted, is the point.
“That’s just real,” Tohn added. “That’s just life.”
(Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn in Nobody Wants This. Source: Netflix.)
The panel returned often to the unusual intimacy of Sasha and Morgan’s friendship—one that gently flirted with romantic tension before settling into something more elusive and, perhaps, more radical: a deeply affectionate platonic bond between a man and a woman. “There’s clearly a connection and a kinship there,” Simons said. “We occupy the same status in our families. We’re not the golden children. There’s a lot of Venn diagram overlap.”
Lupe agreed, adding that the relationship’s safety comes not from the absence of desire but from the clarity around it. “Once that aspect was addressed, it kind of took it off the table in a nice way,” she said, adding, “Then it became safe to be intimate and vulnerable with each other.”
Tohn took the thought further, noting how destabilizing such friendships can feel to long-term partners precisely because they aren’t rooted in obligation or history. “You don’t have the 20 years of bullsh—,” she said, adding, “All the minutiae isn’t there. That’s threatening.”
(Jackie Tohn and Kristen Bell in Nobody Wants This. Source: Erin Simkin / Netflix)
Asked about working alongside Bell—her close friend of more than two decades—Tohn grew reflective, then characteristically wry. “It took her long enough to hire me,” she joked. “It’s a wonderful thing when the exact right thing comes along and you happen to know and love the people making the thing.”
The experience, she said, has been both affirming and rare. “This show is an absolute dream come true, and getting to do it with her is just—she’s the best,” Tohn added.
What makes Nobody Wants This so emotionally resonant is less its sense of resolution than its capacity for recognition. The series doesn’t rush its characters toward certainty. It watches them circle the truth, stall, and occasionally arrive late. Romance is only part of the picture. What stays with you is the way the show notices the quieter negotiations around it—the friendships, marriages, and inner lives adjusting just enough to keep going, as they so often do in life, in the spaces in between.
All 10 episodes of Nobody Wants This Season 2 are available on Netflix.