Everybody Wants Adam Brody (Again)

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Adam Brody has been here before. Not the Santa Monica coffee shop where we meet for breakfast, though that applies too, but more specifically, at a similar point in his career: co-lead on a TV dramedy that’s become a near-instant sensation thanks in large part to his boyish good looks and singular charm. Sound familiar?

“There's a lot of deja vu,” Brody nods over a burrata omelette and coffee. “I mean, a remarkable amount.” In late September, Netflix launched Nobody Wants This, a 10-episode rom-com featuring Brody opposite Kristen Bell as starcrossed Angelenos who make zero sense together on paper—but chemistry has other ideas. It’s breezy, endearing, cliché in all the right ways, not Adrian Lyne-level racy but not chaste either, and at times genuinely funny. In other words, the perfect summer series, even if it technically missed summer by a week. Vibes-wise, it’s even more of a “we are so back” moment for the rom-com genre than Anyone But You. Chalk it up to a renewed appetite for modern rom-coms fuelled by that movie, to a perfect title, to the power of Netflix, or to the casting of two beloved stars who came up in an era of aughts TV that still has a strong nostalgic grip on millennial viewers—or more likely, a strange alchemy of all of the above.

A little over a month after the first season’s release, Brody is still feeling pleasantly surprised—and a little bewildered—by what a phenomenon Nobody Wants This became.

“It all just feels condensed into a shorter timeframe…. The embrace of it. Its absorption into pop culture,” Brody mused. “And also, the amount of interesting calls I get based on it or opportunities…it just feels like the first two years of The O.C. condensed into a month.”

That show, of course, was Brody’s first brush with sudden fame; his turn as Seth Cohen, the sardonic hipster who bags the hottest girl in school without sacrificing his geekiness was one of several x-factors that turned the 2003 Fox teen drama into a paradigm-shifting cultural moment that still sparks heavy reminiscence and debate today. But the series burned as quickly as it did brightly, and after its 2007 series finale Brody settled into a steady stream of supporting roles and character parts, from the Satanist indie-rocker in Jennifer’s Body to the movie producer in last year’s American Fiction. Now, the runaway success of Nobody Wants This has returned him, for the first time in 20 years, to the driver’s seat. He did Jimmy Kimmel for the first time since his teen heartthrob days, people on the street are shouting “Hey, rabbi!” on the street at him in reference to his Nobody character, and his phone rings with a little more frequency. The question then is, where does he go from here?

““It's so funny—I thought I was sort of prepared for it. I thought like last time—and I don't look back with really any regrets—I felt oddly prepared for it then,” he says referring to the O.C. era. “Not because I had delusions of grandeur, but just because I'd been in the business for what felt like a moment at the time. I just kind of felt like I knew the landscape. And it's not a dissimilar feeling now, and yet I thought—I still think, mostly—what you do with it is sort of obvious, but at the same time I found myself a little bit thrown right back into indecision.”

Which brings us back to deja vu again. The monotony of a nighttime soap left young Brody eager to prove himself in other areas, which in turn led to a little overthinking about the options present to him, and even toning down his Cohen performance, less it come off shticky. In Alan Sepinwall’s 2023 oral history of The O.C., creator Josh Schwartz said the writers turned Seth into a pothead to account for Brody’s on-screen lethargy, a narrative Brody disputes with a laugh. “I haven't really pressed [Josh] on this, but I don't think that's true. I don't think they were like, We're going to make him stoned the whole time. I do think I changed my delivery a bit. I think in the beginning I was sort of really hyper, energetic and comedic and neurotic and talking a mile a minute, and I think more than anything I felt like I just grew out of that by the time it was over.”

Now, as a married father on the eve of 45, Brody has lived through the ebbs and flows of the business, achieving what he jokingly called “tenure.”

“I've done it long enough to know that [the phone will] ring eventually, but you're waiting, you're waiting. And there's a rhythm to it. But I appreciate a little faster rhythm.”

But with magnified success came the old flashes of second-guessing.

“I thought of myself as much less self-conscious, I thought of myself as much more willing to go where the wind takes me,” Brody muses. “And then all of a sudden you have some doors to choose from—I'm like, Wait, wait, I don't know, I don't know what door. Even though, I think, when you stop and think about it, both then and now, there's not that many doors and the pathway's fairly obvious, and your personality is going to come out pretty organically through what you decide to do anyway.”

Brody is quick to give himself a heat check, adding that he doesn’t want to “oversell his decisions,” before humbly downgrading “decisions” to “opportunities.” But anyone who’s had an eye on Adam Brody for the last five or so years shouldn’t be too surprised that he’s getting the opportunity to make some big-ish decisions.

Nobody Wants This is, he agrees, “a culmination” of his lightly-calculated move towards more mainstream fare. For every offbeat indie like The Kid Detective, there have been supporting roles in films like the horror favorite Ready or Not, memorable parts in awards-season movies like Promising Young Woman and American Fiction (both of which took home screenplay Oscars), and buzzy TV shows like Fleishman is in Trouble. He’s even dipped a toe into the superhero world, as one of the heroes in the Shazam films.

None of those parts re-centered him into the greater public consciousness quite like Nobody Wants This, where he plays Noah, an Orthodox Jew and rabbi who has aspirations to succeed the head of his synagogue, but also isn’t above smoking weed at dinner parties, leaning into his Hot Rabbi status amidst the congregation, and breaking things off with a beautiful, “good Jewish girl” who loves him because he doesn’t feel the spark anymore. That decision puts him on a crash course with Bell’s Joanne, a brash spitfire who uses dates and sexcapades as fodder for a podcast she hopes will take her to Call Her Daddy heights, and is most importantly, a gentile. What follows is a push-pull courtship with all the opposites attract romcom standards: guards being let down, personalities softening, perceptions altered, compromises litigated.

An easy if not reductive elevator pitch would be to describe Noah as a mature, adult Seth Cohen, a label series creator Erin Foster leaned into in a quote to the New York Times earlier this year, and one Brody softly rejects. “A, she certainly didn't say that to me,” Brody says “B, no, I honestly don't see it that way. I think if it really feels like Seth Cohen to people, that's because Seth Cohen was a lot of me, and this is a lot of me.” The character is much more of a classic romantic lead than we’ve really seen Brody play before, but with a few of the hallmarks that remain constants in his performances. “It's part that, and then it's like, my mommy's mad at me. It's both man and child simultaneously.” Man and Child—the Adam Brody Sweet Spot.

If one element felt familiar to Brody, it was the ever-present concern to make sure the character didn’t come off “too dickish.” “If you want to root for a couple, then you want to root for those people to have the ability to—flawed though they should be—to really be supportive and good to each other, ultimately.” In the show, Joanne is the protypical self-destructive “mess” with lethal defense mechanisms in place until the endlessly understanding Noah helps defang her. He’s also slowly but surely trying to nudge her towards significantly changing her way of life by assimilating into the customs of his religion.

Characters like Noah, and Seth before him, can end up coming off self-centered and condescending, Brody reasons, if someone isn’t constantly conscious of crossing the invisible line.

Brody swears he “gave himself over to the writing” more often than not—often times he’d object to something until Bell and Foster shut him down with “No, this is hot, do it,” he jokes—but cites the episode where Noah endeavors to basically stash Joanne away in the woods at his Hebrew camp when his boss unexpectedly shows up, as one such instance where he had to walk it back a little. “I successfully argued for lessening what was actually on the page in terms of him being, I'm not ashamed or embarrassed, but just like, I, out of necessity need to hide you right now. There's a certain level of that that's unforgivable. You know what I mean?”

The calculus worked. Audiences swooned for Noah in ways that even The O.C. didn’t evoke, obsessing over the character’s romantic gestures even down to physical intangibles, like Brody’s penchant for lovingly cupping and caressing Bell’s face with his palms. Brody, in Pure Brody Bemusement, admits to having no idea a tactile acting choice would reverberate so strongly—“Completely unaware…It was [just] a scene, it wasn't like, They'll talk about this.” (Netflix, ever-attuned to these things, has now changed the show’s thumbnail to an image of Brody’s digits hugging Bell’s cheeks.)

And while the show has met with some backlash, it’s been less about any perceived selfishness on Noah’s part and more about its portrayal of Jewish culture, and specifically Jewish women. In a review for Time, TV critic Esther Zuckerman found characters like Noah’s mother, sister-in-law, and ex to be “one-dimensional nightmares who together fuel stereotypes,” describing them as “needy, overbearing, and nasty.” For Vulture, Fran Hoepfner got right to it, with a headline that asks if Nobody Wants This is “mildly antisemetic.”

Brody isn’t on social media, where sentiments similar to those two pieces caught fire, but admits to having read some of the takes. “I did engage with [the discourse] a little, and I think that's an opportunity for season two,” Brody says diplomatically. “I don't wholly disagree with some of that criticism, nor do I think [the writers] do. And I think the good news is we have wonderful actors and some wonderful writers, most of them women, who are excited for the chance to deepen those characters, dimensionalize—if that is a word, if that's a verb. I don't think it is, but let's just pretend it is.”

Brody won’t say much about the recently, inevitably greenlit season 2, mostly because he doesn’t know enough to tease. “I'm going to let them cook,” he says, unbothered. “I went in once to say hi and saw an early white board. They don’t need me.” All he can really offer is that production is set to begin in February, a turnaround that feels more akin to his network TV days, and one that makes filming more Nobody Wants This first on his list of priorities before he can look into making any of those other promising opportunities a reality.

He’d love to, he says, do something that seems left field, citing David Cronenberg as a random example of a universe he thinks he’d fit into more seamlessly than one might expect. But whatever he chooses to do next, flashes of youthful doubt be damned, he doesn’t find the success so confining any more. “I guess the difference is I'm much, much, much more settled in my life now,” Brody reasons. “I think my sense of self is stronger. And therefore, I'm not as worried of any specific thing defining me.”

This is the kind of clarity that comes with 45, a milestone that he said wasn’t weighing on him too heavily despite the media’s continued fascination with asking questions about a four-year stretch of his early 20s. “It's like, by the time you turn the next age, you’ve thought about it so much that it already feels like you were that. I'm old enough now where I literally forget how old I am sometimes,” Brody jokes. “It just comes so fast. I feel really good. I mean, if you asked me 10 years ago, 20 years ago, what would your dream be for 40? I swear to God I'd be sitting right here. I feel very, very, very, very lucky and very happy and proud even. Proud to still be here, still be doing it.”

“Also, being this age feels great because so many people I work with now, it's the second or third or fourth time I've worked with them, and I just feel more part of it. It used to be like you're a kid and the adults are talking, and now it's like, no, we're all making it together. It feels like we have the keys. I think you always feel like a kid still, in many ways. And so, it's the thrill of feeling like a kid, but going, no, we're all taking the lead now.”

Still, one can’t highlight that he’s in a moment similar to his breakout without acknowledging how things played out back then. It’s easy to make something in a vacuum and be pleasantly surprised by the reaction; repeating the magic trick in the face of preset expectations is a different ballgame. Is the new, content and unbothered Adam Brody feeling any apprehension at all?

“I'll tell you what,” Brody says only half-jokingly, “I'm going to be pretty self-conscious about where I put my hands.”