Watching Netflix’s 2024 smash hitNobody Wants This, it’s pretty hard not to fall for Justine Lupe. Yes, ostensibly the effervescent romcom is all about the love story between agnostic podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and progressive rabbi Noah (Adam Brody). But it’s Joanne’s acerbic younger sister Morgan, played by Lupe, who gets all the best lines (and the best outfits).
If things ever threaten to tiptoe into schmaltzy territory, Lupe is there to shatter it with her deadpan delivery and a weapons-grade eye-roll. “As someone who also does not have much of a filter as a person in the world, I feel Morgan,” the actor laughs. “It’s really fun playing someone who’s a bit unbridled.” She’s speaking over Zoom just after the show’s Los Angeles press conference, sleekly dressed in a brown blazer with impressively voluminous sleeves, and a sheet of blonde hair tucked behind her shoulders (until it breaks free when she becomes animated, punctuating her sentences with gestures).
The series, now in its second season, isn’t just a great showcase for her comic timing; it’s also her biggest part to date. Before it, you probably recognised the 36-year-old for scene-stealing supporting roles in the likes of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Mr Mercedes and Succession. In the latter, she played Willa, the escort turned playwright turned aspiring First Lady who eventually agrees to marry Alan Ruck’s Connor, the eldest Roy sibling and family black sheep (accepting his proposal with the immortal line: “F**k it. Come on, how bad can it be?”). She was only ever meant to appear in three episodes, but impressed showrunner Jesse Armstrong so much that she ended up sticking around for all four seasons of the Emmy-winning drama.
The first round of Nobody Wants This, which is loosely based on creator Erin Foster’s experiences of converting to Judaism after meeting her husband, charts the tentative early stages of Noah (or “hot rabbi”, as he was inevitably christened on social media) and Joanne’s relationship. They attempt to get to grips with their very different lifestyles and win over each others’ families – Morgan included. Lupe’s character isn’t exactly convinced that the romance is going to pan out long-term. You get the impression that she’s seen Joanne go through the honeymoon period many times before (and listened to her dissect it on the podcast that they host together).
But this time around, Lupe explains, “Morgan is really coming to terms with the fact that Joanne and Noah are going to have a go at it. And I’d say that this season is her journey in terms of how she reconciles that new dynamic”. Essentially, she finds herself in that awkward, confronting situation that so many of us will have experienced: when your closest confidante suddenly gets caught up in a serious relationship, and you’re no longer their number one priority. “She’s trying to figure out, OK, what is my life now that I know that there’s something real going on with my sister?”
Lupe grew up in Denver, Colorado, and hails from an artistic family, who supported her acting ambitions from childhood. As a youngster, she’d make camcorder films with her younger brother, who now works as a cinematographer. “I don’t have a sister, but I do know the feeling of regressing back to old family dynamics that are almost teenage,” she says, musing on what makes her and Bell’s on-screen sisterly bond feel so real. “When you get back with your family, it’s almost like you never left their house, and you’re just right back there on the same tracks that you had been on when you were younger. And there’s the whole unconditional love aspect of the relationship – you can kind of say things that you would not normally say to other people.”
There was, she adds, “just natural chemistry” between her and Bell. Plus, in another real-life parallel, show creator Foster also hosts a podcast with her sister, Sara, just like the siblings in the show. Morgan isn’t necessarily based on Sara, but the podcast’s back catalogue did provide some useful inspiration for Lupe to nail that sisterly back-and-forth. “There’s also just this huge well of material that Erin and Sara Foster have online on their podcast,” she says. “They’re very public with their dynamic, and I definitely would go back to that well to just get in touch with the bickering and the rapport.”
I don’t have a sister, but I do know the feeling of regressing back to old family dynamics that are almost teenage
The show might be a love story at heart, but season two also serves as an interesting exploration of the ways we tie ourselves into knots comparing ourselves to our nearest and dearest, and of feeling “behind” in your thirties and beyond. As the series plays out, both sisters end up perturbed by the speed at which their respective relationships seem to be progressing compared to the other’s; Morgan ends up jumping into a romance with Dr Andy, a walking red flag of a man played brilliantly by Lupe’s Succession co-star Arian Moayed. They “didn’t have a lot of scenes together” in the HBO show, but became friends “because we were doing all this crazy travelling together” for various location shoots, so reuniting was a joy.
Watching these episodes from my 33-year-old vantage point, the sisters’ almost competitive scramble to tick off relationship milestones felt particularly poignant. When I tell Lupe this, our interview briefly (and aptly, given her on-screen agony aunt status) becomes a pep talk; thankfully, she takes a much softer approach than the straight-talking Morgan. “I think it’s just a weird time where you’re like, ‘Oh, my life is real and I’m a real adult now. Where am I and how’s it going?’” she says. “And that is an intense thing to face. When I was 33, I ended a long-term relationship, which is a scary thing to do when you’re 33. It takes bravery to do an inventory of ‘OK, where do I need to grow, what things to do I need to work on?” She pauses. “That being said, 33 is so young. You’re a little baby! You’re doing great!”
While filming Nobody Wants This’s first season early in 2024, Lupe was pregnant with her first child, who she shares with her visual artist husband Tyson Mason (the couple married in February this year). When the series premiered, she marked the occasion by sharing an Instagram post that hailed the “cast and crew who supported me from the moment my Gucci skirt ripped open in both the front and back sides on set at 2am when they had no idea I was pregnant and thought I was just rapidly falling apart”. It prompted dramatic headlines suggesting that she “hid her pregnancy from the entire crew, which was ludicrous and not at all what happened”, she says.
She “didn’t like the narrative that I had to disguise myself as a non-pregnant person for months on end”. And so it was important for her to set the record straight (in a thoughtful follow-up post on social media) “because what actually happened was exactly the opposite of that”, she explains. “I disclosed that I was pregnant to this set, and it was completely celebrated and supported.”
In fact, she was one of four pregnant women working on that first season. “It was one of the more positive acting experiences I’ve ever had. I felt really creative and in my element, and I felt really fulfilled.” Plus, Lupe adds, “watching my body grow every week” on film ended up being “a really healing experience”.
She hopes her story is “an encouraging narrative”, because “as a woman in this industry, you kind of go through your twenties and thirties hearing that [working while pregnant] is something that is really tough and is really looked down upon, or that it’s impossible, or that you are put out to pasture during pregnancy. And that’s not to say that’s not a legitimate [industry issue] that has been problematic for a while, but my experience was very positive, so I just wanted to be honest about how it went.”
When the cast began shooting season two, Lupe’s daughter was seven months old, so the actor “went through the weaning hormone drop right as the season started”, because until then, “I had been basically solely breastfeeding. I went back to set and I completely stopped. So there was a lot of anxiety that came along with that, and just negotiating being with the baby and giving the baby enough attention, and being on set and giving work full attention.”
But once she “surrendered to being like, ‘OK, you’re gonna have some hormones flooding through you, it’s gonna be a different body experience”, she “really enjoyed the challenge”. It’s “totally wild”, she adds, to look back on how much her life has changed in the two years or so since she started working on Nobody Wants This – but it’s “also an exciting thing”, she adds, “to feel capable in a different way than you felt before.”
Nobody Wants This season two is on Netflix from 23 October
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