How ‘Nobody Wants This’ Stacked Its Ensemble

Jackie Tohn was at Bell’s house when her best friend and the other producers happened to be discussing potential actors to play Rabbi Noah. Tohn, a self-described “Jew from New York,” who was later cast as Noah’s sister-in-law Esther, couldn’t help but weigh in. “I’m like, ‘Okay, you got your Max Greenfield, but he might be a little old,’” she remembers saying, “‘You got your Skylar Astin, but he might be a little young. You got your [Jason] Biggs, who plays Jewish but isn’t. And then you got your Adam Brody, who’s obviously going to be the tippy top.’”

Indeed, Brody was Bell’s first and only pick to play opposite her. In fact, she even threw together a reel of their previous work in Showtime’s House of Lies and the 2013 film Some Girls to showcase their chemistry. “I was like, ‘Trust me, Adam knows how to stare dopily at someone and so do I, and that’s kind of all you need,’” she says. “I mean, I’d love to tell you that it’s real. It’s not. We both just know how to do it.”

So, they sent Brody the script, and he agreed to a meeting with Foster. He had questions about where the show was headed, many of which Foster couldn’t answer. Still, she was charming, and so was the script. “I was like, ‘Well, fuck it,’” says Brody. “‘I really like her, I like this episode and I love Kristen and it’s Netflix and there’s a lot of reasons to just roll the dice.’” So, he signed on, then threw himself into prep.

Brody went to a Shabbat service and devoured a collection of relevant books, podcasts and films. Later, he’d pick up a few pointers from one of the rabbis who worked at a temple the show filmed in. Despite early talk of having a rabbi on hand to help him — the writers consulted at least one — the only other rabbi that Brody interfaced with was a dad at his kid’s school. Asked if that dad’s world had been positively rocked by the show’s portrayal of rabbis — or, specifically, Brody’s “hot rabbi” — the actor laughs. “No, he plays it pretty cool,” Brody says, “but I like to think it has.”