Perhaps the strongest confirmation that Kristen Bell and Adam Brody make a perfect duo is that the “Nobody Wants This” stars both had the idea to multitask while on separate Zoom calls with me just 20 minutes apart.
Bell, on a minuscule break from shooting something she couldn’t tell me about, apologized for scarfing down a sandwich as we spoke. I got a visual and a rave review of the sandwich (shredded chicken that was dipped in tomato soup before it went into the bread, can you believe it!?) and plenty of charmingly uninhibited views of Bell shoving it into her mouth and trying not to speak with her mouth full, or having to wipe tomato soup off her chin, which she achieved only about 30% of the time.
“I hope this doesn’t gross you out,” she said. “Honestly, I was starving, and they weren’t going to let me leave. But I had to talk to you, so I was able to eat my sandwich, so thank you!”
She also repeatedly cried out, “Where’s Adam?!!!?” in a mockingly exasperated tone, since we were both expecting him to join the call any second. Brody must have missed an alarm, so he called in after Bell hung up. It seemed fitting for a show about a deeply in-love couple, Noah and Joanne, who are trying to navigate their way through his career as a rabbi and hers as a Gentile sex-podcast host, with big life talks about religious conversion and plenty of miscommunication.
He didn’t really know what happened, he told me, as I got to see a view of the bottom of his salt-and-pepper beard and every high, ecru-painted, wood ceiling in his house. His hair was wet from a shower, and he was running around, throwing on socks and a ball cap and taking a minute to ask someone off screen to prepare some snacks. Then I watched him hop in a car to pick up his daughter, Arlo, and take her to a soccer game.
Asking these two about teamwork, let’s be real, is pretty boring. They worked on three projects together before they were paired up as the leads of the Netflix rom-com series created by Erin Foster. They didn’t share any scenes together in “Scream 4,” but Brody remembers that they first met when he and his agent stuffed Bell into the open-air trunk of a two-seat convertible to give her a ride at a screening he thinks was in 2011. They were exes in the 2013 Kenneth Lonergan film “Some Girl(s),” and Brody came on for a multi-episode arc as her love interest in Bell’s series “House of Lies” that same year.
There have been other connections, too. Bell narrated “Gossip Girl,” starring Brody’s wife, Leighton Meester, who has a fun guest role as a momfluencer in “Nobody Wants This,” and they had non-overlapping roles in 2017’s “CHiPs,” directed by Bell’s husband, Dax Shepard.
“So I knew his flow as an actor,” Bell said. “I knew what he was capable of, which is a ton… He oozes charm at all times and sometimes he’ll make an incredibly bizarre choice that I love. He’s also immensely believable. He was someone I would want to work with long term because of what he brings to the table.”
They both have two kids, including preteen daughters, so they understand the dynamics of being working parents. For Brody, the main question going into the series was what kind of chemistry the characters would have, which was quickly superpowered by the bonding he and Bell experienced as they tried to figure out the show — often while they were running behind schedule.
“We were kind of flying by the seat of our pants in Season 1,” he said, “so we would have to have a quick [conversation] about the pages every morning because they were so in flux. I’d come up to her in the makeup chair and we would go through, like, ‘This is the scene. What do we think? Do we want to try to maybe rejigger it a little bit?’”
Brody said that he and Bell have developed an intimacy that mimics all the parts of a real relationship, where sometimes they get annoyed with each other but mostly really enjoy being together.
“It’s the same way with any long relationship in general,” he said. “Occasionally you’re like, ‘Oh, they’re really mad at me!’… It’s interesting — I remember catching it in the middle of a scene a couple of times, especially toward the end of the second half of the season, where a few times she got really pissed off and it felt real and it took a different and surprising look, not too dissimilar from real life and those first times when you really anger your partner.”
Their arguments on set tend to be about pop culture and food. He’s a Criterion Collection guy who’s always recommending international documentaries like “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” while she pushes him to watch reality TV like “Million Dollar Secret” or prestige shows like “Paradise” instead. Bell also described Brody as “a connoisseur of Los Angeles sandwiches” who’s constantly trying to break her out of her routines. (It pleased him to no end to learn that she was eating a sandwich while we spoke.)
If the main tension of Season 1 was these two getting together, Season 2 held the question of whether Joanne would convert. (Season 3, which has already been shot, will be about the reality of that conversion and the merging of two very different families.)
“A lot of Season 1 was Joanne cleaning up her messy life in order to be with this more stable, traditional Noah character,” Bell said, “and what I liked about Season 2 was they decided to show some cracks in Noah’s personality. Not necessarily mistakes he was making, but ways he could adjust to Joanne in the same ways we showed how Joanne could adjust to Noah.”
For both of them, the standout episode of Season 2 was Joanne and Noah’s first Valentine’s Day, when she discovers he’s been making the same “good boyfriend” gestures and giving her the same romantic gifts he gave his exes.
First, it involved what Bell called the most dramatic thing that’s happened on set: They filled up a bathtub in the house they’d rented as Joanne’s apartment and water started raining from the ceiling onto camera equipment in the bedroom below. They had to clear out for a few days to bring in contractors and plumbers to make sure the ceiling wouldn’t cave in.
“It wasn’t hard for me to get behind the idea that a two-person bath might not be the romantic experience you think,” Bell said, laughing.
Brody singled out the episode because Noah is often an incredible boyfriend but he got to be a bit of an ass for once. “I had a lot of fun [with that episode] because he’s pretty obtuse and I love playing that.”
And Bell chose it mainly because it was a moment when Joanne got to tell Noah she didn’t like the necklace he also gave his ex or the tandem bike ride he had done with every other girlfriend. “It was the perfect plotline, because you were rooting for him because he was doing something nice,” she said, “but you were also rooting for Joanne to finally say what her needs were.”
This story first ran in the Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
