Kristen Bell and Adam Brody have both been at the centre of plenty of praise for their performances in the Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This.
It might interest you to know, then, that the show’s creator Erin Foster initially had someone very different in mind for the part of Joanne.
The 10-part series was inspired by the early days of Erin’s relationship with her husband, and while promoting the show, she admitted she initially hoped to play the lead role herself.
However, it was Netflix who raised the idea of Kristen playing the title character.
“I wanted an actress who would fall into it in a really relaxed, natural way. And from our first meeting at Netflix, after they bought the idea, immediately for them, it was like, ‘It’s Kristen Bell. It’s Kristen Bell no matter what. It is Kristen Bell. That is who it is’,” Erin recalled to Harper’s Bazaar.
“They have worked with her many times before, and they are obsessed with her. They love her.”
She continued: “We had a meeting, and she was so respectful, nice, and complimentary, and she very clearly, very quickly said, ‘Erin, I know you wrote this for yourself to be in. I’m not comfortable taking this role away from you’. And I said, ‘Well, first of all, it doesn’t sound like I really have a choice, so let’s do this’.”
However, Erin had another reason for not wanting to take on the part, as she was trying to get pregnant at the time, and has since welcomed her daughter, Noa.
“I said to her, ‘The truth is, I want to be a mum. I’m trying to get pregnant, and that’s really my life focus right now, becoming a mum. I don’t want to be sitting in a hair and make-up trailer at 5am’,” she said.
Erin added that she was very happy with the way things turned out, insisting: “It would’ve been way too much. I was really trying to get pregnant, and I knew that those two things happening at the same time wasn’t going to work. And so I was kind of giving her my blessing. Like, ‘I want it to be you. I don’t want it to be me’.
“And after that, it just sort of all fell into place. She really wanted us to cast Adam, too. They had a personal relationship, outside of it, a friendship. She felt really confident that they would have great chemistry. And she was right. She’s got a really great instinct for casting. She had really good ideas.”
Since it began streaming last week, Nobody Wants This has won near-unanimously positive reviews, with attention already turning to whether a second season could be on the cards.
Nobody Wants This is available to stream now.