Justine Lupe on the unexpected chemistries that power Netflix’s ‘Nobody Wants This’

For any good rom-com, chemistry is key, as Netflix's smash hit series Nobody Wants This so delightfully demonstrates. But it isn’t just the romantic relationship between leading love interests Joanne (Kristin Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody) that gives the show its spark: The crackling repartee between sisters and podcasting partners Joanne and Morgan (Justine Lupe) — calling each other out with affection, mostly — proved just as crucial to the show's appeal, and that special alchemy was almost instantaneous.

"I've got to be honest: I feel like it happened pretty quickly!" Lupe told Gold Derby at a recent FYC event for the series at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where she and castmates Bell, Brody, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn joined series creator Erin Foster and her sister Sara Foster, also a producer on the show, to record an episode of their own real-life podcast.

"I think Kristen's such an incredible actress, and I kind of just made it my mission: If I focused on her, if I put my attention on her, that everything would kind of fall into place and that it would be easeful and that the chemistry would just be there," said Lupe. "Because she's such an open person, and I know myself and I'm a really open person, so the dialogue was there, the script was in place and the direction was there. So I think just us being present with each other kind of did enough that there was some good chemistry from the very beginning."

Lupe also found fertile opportunities to create an unpredictably off-kilter bond — part feud and part fondness — between Morgan and Noah’s unfiltered, often socially maladroit brother Sasha, played by Simons; though Sasha is devoted to his domineering wife Esther (Tohn), viewers were left wondering if the pair's chemistry might percolate into something… more.

"You'll have to see what happens this [coming] season in terms of our dynamic, but I think last season we kind of were kept in the dark about what exactly was going on between them," Lupe teased while describing how she and Simons came at crafting their banter.

"We wanted to play the kind of magnetism that was there and the chemistry was there and the attraction that was there without kind of veering it too far into a necessarily romantic attraction," she revealed. "And so living in that gray space was really interesting for both of us, especially because as an adult you really do understand what that dynamic is when you have your own kind of life and your own relationships, but you meet someone later on that brings out a different energy in you."

Lupe pointed out the sparks that fly between several of the show’s characters, romantically entangled and otherwise, as the show both leans into and upends romantic comedy traditions.

"There's just incredible chemistry and I think that's a big part of every good rom-com," she said. "I like that they're doing something a little bit different, coming into the romance at a different time than we normally see people coming into a romantic relationship in their lives. I like that these people are in their late thirties and they're finding each other when they're more evolved and they know themselves really well, and yet there's still a lot to learn about each other and themselves and a lot of growing to do."

Erin Foster told Gold Derby that she knows that as the show heads into its second season there’s an inherent challenge in adapting the established rom-com formula into a long-form streaming series, finding a steady stream of fresh and believable obstacles to challenge Joanne and Noah’s relationship, but "the best way to do it is the real-life small challenges."

"The first year of a relationship is all the tricky stuff of how you merge your friends and what the day-to-day looks like and how you see the next five years," she said. "To me that's the easier way to create challenges instead of the big formulaic stuff. It's really like the small stuff."

"I think that's why Erin, her writing resonates so much with people, because she writes complicated, messy real-life stories" added Sara Foster. "Real-life relationships are not simple. They're multifaceted. They take a long time to get to where you kind of want to go, and so there's a lot to cover."

"There's a lot of small stuff!" the sisters said in unison.

Season 2 of Nobody Wants This will premiere Oct. 23.