It was the announcement heard ’round the internet: Leighton Meester was joining the second season of Nobody Wants This, the breakout hit starring her husband Adam Brody.
“It was honestly [co-showrunner] Jenni Konner‘s idea and it was brilliant of her,” creator Erin Foster told The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s season 2 premiere of how the casting came about. “I’d just seen Leighton at the SAG Awards — we were like she’s so cute, she’s so sweet, she’s so funny, and then I told Jenni how great she was and she was like, ‘Let’s put her in.’”
In the show — which sees Brody’s “Hot Rabbi” Noah and Kristen Bell‘s agnostic sex podcaster Joanne fall in love while trying to navigate their extreme differences — Meester appears as a mommy influencer who had childhood beef with Joanne. That means that most of her screen time is with Bell and her onscreen sister Justine Lupe, rather than with Brody.
“It’s because the character was already written into the script without being cast at all,” Foster explained, but the writers got crafty once Meester signed onto the role. “When she said yes, I went back into the script — they didn’t even have any scenes together so I gave them their little scene together and I really wanted him to say, ‘She’s not my type.’ He says that in the episode and it just meant a lot to me to get to say something funny like that because I thought it could become a meme.”
For his part, Brody said it “wasn’t a prerequisite” for he and his wife to share scenes when the executive producers brought up the idea of Meester joining the show. He added, “The point was we got to drive to work together. I like that she was with the girls, the ladies.”
Season two explores Brody and Bell’s characters in the first six months of their relationship as they more deeply get to know each other’s friends, family and each other, as Brody also teased that he “thought this season was very funny” when he first got the scripts.
And as for the reaction to the project — having become one of Netflix’s biggest shows as well as landing Emmy nominations for best comedy series and its stars — Brody mused, “It’s been the biggest thing that I’ve been largely associated with in quite some time and that’s always a surprise. You just never know if something is going to connect in a big way; you know if you like it, you know what you think about the quality, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to hit and the timing is going to be right or the marketing is going to be right — it doesn’t mean it’ll find an audience at all. So that’s always a pleasant surprise.”
Nobody Wants This season two starts streaming Oct. 23 on Netflix.
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