Adam Brody is returning to TV screens in the new Netflix series Nobody Wants This. Photo / Adali Schell, The New York Times
His breakout role was as the nerdy Jewish heartthrob in The O.C. Now in the rom-com Nobody Wants This, he goes full rabbi.
Adam Brody’s bar mitzvah was held six months late. It was barely held at all. This was in San Diego, in the early 1990s, and Brody, who spent most of his free time surfing, attended Hebrew school only under duress. He knew few other Jews.
“I wanted long, straight blonde hair,” he said. “All my idols were named Shane.”
A decade later, after a cursory stint at community college, an impulsive move to Los Angeles, a handful of television one-offs and a brief arc on Gilmore Girls, Brody became the most famous Jewish (well, half Jewish) high schooler in America. (He was actually 23, which made the fandom a little tricky.) Starring as Seth Cohen on the sun-kissed teen romantic dramedy The O.C., he played a curly-haired heartthrob, responsible for introducing the holiday portmanteau “Chrismukkah” into the lexicon.
Josh Schwartz, a creator of The O.C. put a lot of himself into Seth. But Brody, he said in an interview, brought charisma and a surfer cool to a character who could have come off as merely nerdy. “He’s an aspirational Jew,” Schwartz joked of Brody.
The O.C. ended four years later. (Beachy TV can accommodate only so many car crashes and love triangles, and 20-somethings can’t play teens forever.) Brody worked steadily for the next two decades, darting between film and television. Mostly he played variations on a theme, the nice guy, although they aren’t always so nice. As he reminded me over lunch in Santa Monica, “I’ve played my fair share of rapists and murderers.”
But Brody’s gift is for comedy – comedy flecked with emotional complication. He reminded viewers of this in the 2022 limited series Fleishman Is in Trouble, in which he played another aspirational Jew, a likable finance guy. (This is harder than it looks.) He is now the star of Nobody Wants This, a Netflix romantic comedy about Noah (Brody), a Los Angeles rabbi, who falls for Joanne (Kristen Bell), an outspoken non-Jewish podcaster. It premieres September 26.
Brody returning to screens as a wry, Jewish dreamboat? Everybody wants this.
Brody, 44, described himself as “not religious at all, a nonbeliever”. He and his wife, actress Leighton Meester, another veteran of teen soap stardom, are not raising their children in any denomination. He enjoys the irony that his major roles all share a faith. “The world is telling me something,” he said.
Rapists and murderers aside, there is not perhaps a great distance between the real-life Brody and his best-known characters. They are all charming, canny, gently self-deprecating, cool, but not so cool as to be passionless. (And handsome in a way that can make a reporter feel fluttery? Sure. Yes.) This is not a dig. Some actors transform for each new role, while others are extremely good at bringing themselves to their characters, of lending even outlandish moments a surprising realness.
“Adam has that quality of it being very Adam,” director Valerie Faris said. “But at the same time, it’s perfect for the character, too.” She and her husband, Jonathan Dayton, cast Brody in a Mountain Dew commercial in his early days in Hollywood. Later they directed him in Fleishman Is in Trouble.
“You can watch him say anything,” Dayton said. “It’s just interesting.”
Bell felt that, too. “When you act with Adam, you feel like you’re talking to a real person,” she said. She knows Brody socially and has acted opposite him often. (They once filmed a sex scene for House of Lies when Bell was nearly eight months pregnant. “Adam affectionately referred to it as our threesome,” she said.)
Bell was attached to Nobody Wants This first, and she told Erin Foster, who created the show, that she knew who should play Noah. “I thought, there’s one person that can pull off the charm and eagerness and professionalism and quirk that this character requires,” she said. That one person was Brody.
Foster had based the show on her own experience. Though her husband is not a rabbi, he is Jewish and wanted to marry a Jewish woman. Foster converted for him. “It all worked out,” she said. “I love being Jewish.” As much as she trusted Bell, she wanted to make sure she found the perfect Noah.
“We auditioned every hot Jewish guy in town,” she said.
Foster wouldn’t say how long this list was. Brody topped it. “It’s obvious,” Foster said. “I mean, he was always cute, but he’s now this very hot adult man. It felt really exciting to show him as this adult version of Seth Cohen.”
Yet she and Bell weren’t sure he would take the role. Not every actor wants to show up as an adult variation of the teenager he played 20 years ago, a Seth who had spent less time at the beach and more time at shul. Beyond that, Brody has a reputation for being choosy about his roles.
“He will not do a project that doesn’t feel right to him,” Foster said.
Bell was even more blunt. “Adam Brody is incredibly picky,” she said. “And that’s part of his charm. He’s not always available to everyone.”
Well, who hasn’t fallen for an unavailable man? But Brody doesn’t see himself that way. Yes, there were a few years after The O.C. when he chose projects to separate himself from Seth. “I was precious for a while,” is how he put it. But then he married, and he and Meester had their first child. “It was a freeing, in a way, because I thought, OK, now let me just go earn my living,” he said. “I won’t worry. I won’t be so self-conscious. I’ll just go do work, and it’ll be a joy to be employed.”
It has been a joy, mostly. So if Brody hesitated to play Noah, he wasn’t being choosy. He was wondering if an atheist could or should play a rabbi.
“As someone who barely got bar mitzvahed and retained nothing from it, I did feel a responsibility,” he said. He knew, he said, that there wasn’t just one way to be Jewish, but he didn’t want to let anyone down.
At first, he worked to find the points of commonality in the character, the Adamness of Noah. They dressed similarly, they spoke similarly. Noah’s insecurity? He has felt that, too. Delivering a sermon isn’t so different from acting. “Publicly performing as a job, putting yourself out there like that, it still makes me insecure,” he said.
And he could relate, of course, to falling in love.
“Most fortunate people can,” he said.
So that was enough. Almost. Noah was a cool rabbi – trash talking, pot smoking, fun. But as Noah says in an early episode, “I play up the Torah bad boy vibe, but I’m all in on this thing.” His character, Brody realised, lived his whole life according to his relationship with God and the Torah. He would have to embrace that part of Noah, too. Brody attended a Shabbat service in his neighbourhood and worked through a library of books, podcasts and documentaries about Judaism, with probably too much emphasis on the Holocaust.
Given the current conflict in the Middle East and the rise in global antisemitism, this is of course a fraught moment to play a Jewish Romeo. While Brody is casual in his conversation and seems to enjoy interviews, he gave this subject more thought, more weight. Playing a Jewish community leader has a different inflection now.
“The representation feels heavier on me,” he said. “And I feel slightly disconcerted about it, to be honest.” But Noah, he knew, was a hero of this story. A good son, a good brother, a good rabbi who gets the goyish girl. “We’re going to root for him,” Brody said. “He’s going to grab the girl and kiss the girl with the yarmulke on. And that seems pretty positive.”
The experience didn’t bring him closer to God, but it might have brought him closer to himself and the contours of his career. If he spent some years resisting Seth Cohen-adjacent roles, he doesn’t seem to mind them so much now.
He feels that he has matured as an actor, not so much in terms of technique, “although I’ve learned some tricks, some shortcuts,” he said. But he has more life experience underneath that curly hair now, more emotion. And as with “Fleishman,” he feels pleasure in making a mainstream show that is likely to be widely seen. Bring on the Noahs, the Seths, the comedies.
“I’d be lying if I said I don’t like gratification,” he said. “It’s a lot better than ‘Oh, are you still acting?’ "
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Adali Schell
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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