'Nobody Wants This': Adam Brody, Kristen Bell on love, why perfect match 'can't be found'

Like any single person past a certain age, Erin Foster can rattle off bad date stories, the kind that when shared over brunch transform the storyteller’s side of the table into a stage and their mimosa into a microphone.

There was the emergency room doctor Foster liked because of his distance from the entertainment industry. The daughter of Grammy-winning composer David Foster, she has appeared on several shows including “House,” “The O.C.” and a series she created with her sister Sara Foster called “Barely Famous” that parodied their lives. Little did Foster know the physician seemingly eyed an ER-GOT.

“On our date, he literally says to me, ‘You know you should read my script that I wrote. I'm also a comedy writer,’” Foster, 42, recalls in an interview. “I was like, ‘That can't be real. You are an ER doctor! Why are you writing comedy? Stop!’”

But one day, when Foster was 35 and sick of sifting through guys with “all of these weird obsessions,” she spotted Simon Tikhman at an unexpected place: the gym.

“I don't even work out. So I don't know what happened, why that happened?” Foster says in disbelief. This reporter, a hopeful romantic, will chalk it up to fate.

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Foster and Tikhman wed on New Year’s Eve in 2019, after she converted to Judaism for the co-founder of the management company The Core Entertainment. Their union resulted in two births: daughter Noa Mimi Tikhman born in May and Netflix comedy “Nobody Wants This,” streaming Thursday.

In the premiere of the 10-episode first season, unfiltered podcast host Joanne (Kristen Bell) collides with a man totally her opposite at a dinner party. She has an undeniable connection with the charming, emotionally available Noah (Adam Brody), but things are complicated by a difference in beliefs. She’s agnostic, and he’s a rabbi with a “Torah bad-boy vibe,” intent on marrying a Jewish woman to satisfy his family and congregation.

“My husband's not a rabbi, and we didn't have enough differences, I think, to really base it off of just us,” Foster says. “So we had to kick it into high gear and make her a little bit more provocative and make him more conservative.”

Being pulled to someone who isn’t your exact match is something Bell can identify with. She and actor/podcaster Dax Shepard, together since 2007, have been open about turning to couples’ therapy to resolve their conflicts.

“My personal philosophy, having married someone who is the polar opposite of me and loving every minute of every disagreement we ever have because it keeps us stimulated and open-minded and growth-oriented, is that I don't think the perfect puzzle piece is out there,” Bell, 44, says. “It can't be found. It will not be found, and you are fooling yourself if you think that it is.

“You have a connection with someone,” she continues. “You decide if it's worth it, and you grow together and hopefully that's toward each other, and that will provide longevity. We are playing a bit of a tricky game in the rom-com business because we're not actually presenting that, but what I like about this show so much is it actually does present so many of the problems that arise when someone isn't your ‘perfect match’ and you have to actually question is this worth fighting for?”

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In other ways, Bell had to put in effort to connect with Joanne, the kind to ditch a date if he’s too close to his grandmother or get the ick if a man repeatedly says “sport coat”.

“I think that Joanne is kind of such a hot mess, in preparing for the part, I was like, ‘I'm just going to get behind her choices,’” Bell says. “The choices are often made out of a fear of acceptance. And so once I was able to root into something that I also share and hold (as) sort of core emotion, then I was like, “Oh, yeah. Now I see why she can be so brazen or so offensive at times because she's got all these guards up.’”

Brody, also 44, jokes Noah “is the role that I've been procrastinating a lifetime for.” Though Brody identifies as an atheist now, he says his parents loosely held on to some Jewish traditions during his childhood. He had a bar mitzvah done “six months late, turns out because I didn't study hard enough.”

“My home life was very different, and my upbringing was very different than Noah's,” Brody says. So he formed his character using bits “brought in from research that I did and enjoyed very much.”

Something that comes naturally for the two leads is their Fourth of July-rivaling fireworks that will likely have millennials feeling like Chrismukkah come early. Bell and Brody played love interests in Showtime’s “House of Lies” (2012-2016) and exes in the 2013 feature “Some Girl(s).” Their latest project has even Shepard remarking on their onscreen chemistry. “If anything in this show is the absolute home run of the show it’s the connection of you two,” Shepard praised on the Sept. 16 episode of his podcast, Armchair Expert, with Bell and Brody as guests.

Joanne and Noah’s strong bond is one worth fighting for Brody says, despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles. “I mean what are we doing here if not to love?” says Brody, who has been married to actress Leighton Meester for a decade. The couple share two children. “The love of a significant other that's a really special relationship. I don't know what else there is if you're not going to fight for that.”