The relationship between Joanne and Noah in Netflix's new hit show Nobody Wants This is the relationship everybody wants right now.
Be honest, seeing Adam Brody gently hold Kristen Bell's face in his hands when he kisses her had you questioning whether magical relationship like this exist in real life. In good news for all the romantics out there, it turns out they do.
In fact, the story of Nobody Wants This is loosely based on the life of the show's creator, Erin Foster.
Like the show's protagonist Joanne, Foster co-hosts a podcast with her sister, Sara Foster, called The World's First Podcast.
She was also agnostic up until the point she met her now-husband, Simon Tikhman. The rom-com mirrors Foster's real-life relationship with Tikhman, who, while not a rabbi like Noah, is a Jewish man.
Like all great romances, the two love birds actually met at a gym in LA in 2018.
"We would see each other every other day at 9am I just started to notice him and being like, 'Who is that cute guy doing pullups and smiling at me?'" Foster gushed on her podcast.
The pair began dating and Foster eventually ended up converting to Judaism before marrying Tikhman on New Year's Eve in 2019.
"I genuinely love being married. It is different. There is a closeness that can go even deeper when you're married," Tikhman shared while joining Foster on her podcast.
When speaking about converting to Harper's Bazaar, Foster said, "If he had asked me to be in a cult, I would've been in a cult. I was 35 and needed to lock it down. So I thought, 'Of course I will.' But then when I went through the process and went to the converting classes at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, it was this really fascinating, expansive, cool world."
The two have since welcomed their daughter Noa into the world in May 2024.
Also sprinkled into the show are references to Foster's real life podcast with her sister. In one particular episode, Joanne and Morgan discuss things that would give them the "ick" and reference "running with a backpack". These quotes were taken directly from an episode of The World's First Podcast.
However, Foster has reiterated that the sister character of Morgan is not at all like her real-life sister Sara.
"The sister character is not like Sara at all," Erin said, "That was intentional, too. I wanted to create a fun sister dynamic."
When it comes to Noah's overbearing mother in the Nobody Wants This, Foster has set the record straight that that was not her lived experience and was purely a plot line in service of the story.
"You have to have conflict for a TV show so you have to create people pushing back against the relationship," she said on her podcast.
In an interview with Harper's Bazaar in September 2024, Foster gushed about her husband's family and acknowledged that, while it did take some adjustment in the beginning, they couldn't be closer.
"I was not the dream daughter-in-law, but he has an amazing family, and they had to get used to me one way or another. And now we're all really best friends, and so close, and we're all so lucky to have each other. But it was tricky in the beginning, for sure. Those aren't real moments [in the show]. I didn't show up at temple and she saw me for the first time," she said.
When it came down to it, Foster maintains the challenges they faced in their relationship were not solely based on the fact that Tikham was Jewish and she was not. She highlights their different upbringings and social circles as part of their cultural clash.
"What was interesting for the purposes of a show was how similar it seemed like our lives were, but then, when we dug into it, how different they really were. And it wasn't down to being Jewish and not Jewish," she said.
"It was coming from immigrant parents — Simon's parents are Russian Jews who fled the Soviet Union because they were Jewish. They had been married for 40-something years. And Sara and I come from this very entertainment-centred Los Angeles family with lots of marriages and divorces. We couldn't have been from more different worlds, and those different worldviews really put us in a unique position to have … not conflict, but challenges moving forward and starting a life together."
As for Tikhman's initial reaction to the series, Foster told the Today show, "I had a lot of anxiety around that, and I intentionally made the characters really different than the people are in real life because I didn't want to get divorced. My husband is, like, really private. Being married to someone like me is his personal hell. Literally today, he was like, 'Have a great day. Good luck with the interviews. Please don't talk about me.'"
However, after seeing the show, Tikhman remains Foster's biggest fan
"This is what Erin's supposed to be doing," he said, "She's a writer and she's incredible at it."
Aside from Foster's association with the hit Netflix show that has everybody swooning, she certainly carved out her own place in pop culture.
Outside of her recent Netflix endeavours, Foster is booked and busy. In addition to co-hosting The World's First Podcast with her sister, Foster also co-created and starred in the VH1 reality-TV parody series Barely Famous. In 2020, she founded a clothing line called Favourite Daughter.
She even has two screen connections to Adam Brody, having made appearances on The O.C. and Gilmore Girls back in the day — two shows he starred in. Their co-working future was always meant to be!
Her father is the famous music composer and producer David Foster, who has had several high-profile relationships throughout his life, including with Yolanda Hadid and Linda Thompson. This means Foster is step-siblings with the famous Jenner brothers and Hadid sisters. Yeah, we're talking Brody Jenner, Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid (and more).
In a recent episode of Watch What Happens Live, host Andy Cohen asked about her relationship with her former step-siblings and Foster said, "Yes, I am [still close]. Gigi actually just DM'd me last night saying she was starting to watch the show… The kids don't get divorced, just the parents do."
Watch Erin Foster on Watch What Happens: Live with Andy Cohen.
Feature Image: Getty.
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