Justine Lupe has made an art out of scene-stealing. And not in the usual way, not by being showy or pushy or big-footing her way into something. The actress simply makes every scene she’s in — from “Succession” (two SAG Ensemble wins) to “Mr. Mercedes” to her current work on “Nobody Wants This” — better by way of her natural good humor, her ability to take the most outlandish bits and make them feel decidedly human. She delights in working with other actors. She is thoughtful about good writing. She wants to make everything better, and somehow, that seems like half the battle.
She is also just — and this cannot be overstated — so easily funny. Well, at least it looks easy. Maybe that’s why, when she unpacks the big emotional guns, it hits even harder.
When we first met Lupe’s Morgan Williams in Season 1 of creator Erin Foster’s smash hit Netflix series “Nobody Wants This,” she made for an excellent foil and reliable ride-or-die for her big sister and podcast partner Joanne (Kristen Bell). Acerbic and funny and not at all afraid of calling out Joanne’s shit, the sisters were based on Foster and her own sister, Sara. Lupe still recalls what grabbed her about those early scripts.
“Erin somehow managed to find this fine line of very biting, kind of dry, a little dickish, bratty humor, while also having so much heart running through all of it,” Lupe told IndieWire during a recent interview. “It was very clear that these sisters love each other and have this kind of rivalry and banter going on, and that comes out in all their dialogue. I liked that I could hear her voice and that it had these two tones that lived in equal measure. I hadn’t really experienced that before. I could feel how familiar Morgan was to Erin.”
Lupe laughed. “Then, immediately upon looking into who Erin Foster was, I was like, ‘Oh, yes. I was correct,’” she said. Lupe binged the Fosters’ own podcast and “kind of dove into the archive of everything that they’d put out there.” Morgan felt real because she is or, at least, she is rooted in someone very real and very beloved by Erin.
But Lupe was eager to make Morgan her own, pushing her take on the character to get “way more messy” and “a bit more kooky.” “I kind of hijacked Sara and made her into my own, but I still reference her,” she said. “That kind of forward-facing fun that Morgan and Joanne have with each other, a little bratty and bitchy, that’s very much Sara and Erin’s dynamic. I always turn back to that when we’re doing the podcast scenes. But I’m a little bit more sloppy and loose than Sara. Sara’s this amazing specimen, and I’m just, as Justine, a little bit more of a rat. Some of the poise and the chicness that she carries, I try and bring that, I just have a different vibe to me, I think I have to work hard to get into her posture.”
‘Nobody Wants This’HOPPER STONE/NETFLIX
In the series’ second season, Lupe dove more into Morgan’s emotional state and what really makes her tick. She’s not just a sidekick or second fiddle, and she’s far more self-aware than she might have first seemed.
“There’s definitely a mask that Morgan has, and I’m not saying that Sara has a mask, but she feels very self-aware, she feels like she understands, she’s grown up in a public-facing way,” Lupe said. “She’s been in the entertainment business for a while. She really understands her relationship with the public, and so I took that feeling to Morgan. I think Morgan’s always aware of people watching her, how she’s being perceived, and so there is a bit of a mask that she wears, and it comes down in moments of vulnerability. Especially in the last season, I tried to keep that, that she likes feeling curated as much as possible.”
In the series’ second season, Morgan gets a hell of a subplot. While so much of the rom-com series is built on the ups and downs of Joanne and Noah’s (Adam Brody) seemingly mismatched romance, giving Morgan her own romantic upheaval seemed like a natural next step. Her sister is in love; why shouldn’t she be?
But, in true Morgan fashion, she zigged where everyone else might have zagged: by dating her own therapist, Dr. Andy (her “Succession” co-star Arian Moayed). What seems right and good to Morgan? Well, it feels insane to everyone else.
“I thought it was really fun and funny, but as we kept on going, and honestly, when I watched it, I realized how sad it is too. It snuck up on me,” Lupe said of Morgan’s Season 2 subplot. “At the time, I was like, ‘Oh, this is such a fun storyline that she falls in love with her therapist, introduces him to the family!’ and then the ending hits where she’s like, ‘OK, I’ll go back on the apps. I didn’t want to do that.’”
‘Nobody Wants This’ERIN SIMKIN/NETFLIX
As the story unfolded, Lupe was struck by the very real (and very relatable) concerns that fueled Morgan’s romantic choice. Some of it goes back to Joanne finding love, but most of it is Morgan finally allowing herself to realize that her life has changed in ways she didn’t want it to.
“You realize the reality is, this is a woman in her late 30s, who’s feeling like she’s behind, and is desperate to find something that feels like real intimacy with someone,” the actress said. “The person that she turns to is her therapist, and she fast-tracks this ludicrous relationship, because she’s scared that she’s going to not find what her sister found, and she’s going to be alone. It’s weird that I didn’t think about that [right away], how this is really relatable and kind of an intense thing that a lot of my girlfriends are going through. It started out as this very fun, goofy storyline, and then by the end of the whole process, I was like, ‘Ugh, Morgan. Poor Morgan.’”
So, in Lupe’s mind, how much of Morgan’s life, particularly her romantic one, is rooted in comparing herself to Joanne? To Dr. Andy? To Noah?
“The way I find my way into it is my own feelings, that it’s less an intellectual ‘This plus this equals this,’ it’s more just a heartsickness when your girlfriends change,” Lupe said. “They’re evolving into a different place in their life. [Morgan is] still in the place where they were having slumber parties together, hanging out, going out. I know that feeling so well, because I have very codependent relationships with my girlfriends, and I’ve been the person to [move on] and I’ve also been the person that feels left behind by a friend moving into a next phase of their life.”
Morgan might not be willing to tell herself all that, but she’s feeling it throughout Season 2, and that’s where the Dr. Andy stuff came from. That’s how Lupe sees it, and she’s certainly on to something here.
“It’s like a body feeling. It’s a heartbreak of a kind,” the actress said. “You’re so excited for them, and at the same time, there’s a visceral feeling of like, ‘Oh, the change is happening, and that’s hard.’ You have to renegotiate who you turn to, how you turn to them, what level of support they can give, and what level of fun you guys can have. Morgan, there’s a lot of intellectualizing in terms of them having these conversations, where she’s kind of picking on Joanne or toying with Joanne. There’s a little bit of the train running off the track and her spinning out, and this is the way that she handles it: ‘I’m going to start dating the guy that “knows me” and find some sort of an anchor. This is something to hold onto.’”
It’s not.
‘Nobody Wants This’ERIN SIMKIN/NETFLIX
The season culminates with a big, splashy engagement party for Morgan and Dr. Andy at, of all places, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (“Crazy! One of the most expensive engagement parties known to man!,” Lupe exclaimed). But it’s not just a party, it’s also the location of Morgan finally breaking up with Dr. Andy. What timing!
“I just had a conversation with someone who had an experience like this, where a friend of theirs had sex with one of the bartenders at their wedding, and then [she still] got married and they soon broke up. It’s this kind of, oh, everything comes out in the wash, and if you’re not ready to do it, shit happens,” she said. “When you’re right up against the reality of what you’re doing, if it’s not aligned, things can get a little bit crazy. For me, it’s totally unhinged, and it would be something that I would live with forever, but I’m also shocked at how often I’ve heard stories of this kind of thing happening.”
Joanne knows Morgan doesn’t want to marry Dr. Andy, and when she tells the sisters’ parents, it’s their mother, Lynn (Stephanie Faracy), who steps up. She grabs a dazed Morgan, plies her with a big drink, and hits her with some pretty hard truths about her own ill-fated marriage. It works. Morgan snaps out of it and dumps Dr. Andy under a perilously large flower arch. I told Lupe that I felt, even as a viewer, very proud of Morgan in that moment.
“Totally, and I’m proud of Lynn, I’m proud of her mom for being like, ‘Girl, wake up,’ and having some real transparency about her relationship with her dad and how she wished she had done things differently,” Lupe said. “We’ve never really seen that. These are girls who have very codependent and interpersonal relationships with their parents, but there’s not actually full transparency or real intimacy with them, so I feel like it was a real moment for Lynn to come out and be like, ‘Hey. You deserve to feel this.’”
The Dr. Andy subplot also gave Lupe the chance to feel Morgan out in a different kind of romantic relationship. In the first season, Morgan’s bond with Noah’s brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) was so delightful and sparky that many wondered if the leads’ siblings were bound for their own relationship. Lupe said her bond and chemistry with Simons was immediate, and the pair are now close friends even outside of the show.
‘Nobody Wants This’Courtesy of Netflix
But the possibility of a Morgan and Sasha relationship was controversial in the fandom, mostly because Sasha is already married (his complicated romance with Esther, the also-delightful Jackie Tohn, got its own heady subplot this season). It’s also something the actors thought about a lot.
“I think the question of it was, ‘What is this chemistry? Is there a name to it, or is it just this kind of ambiguous, somewhere on the spectrum of friendships, romantic kind of attraction? Where does it lie?’” she said. “That was something that we were always trying to track, and many times with no answer in sight, which I think makes it more interesting. But I had no trouble having chemistry with Tim; he could have chemistry with a sack of potatoes. He’s just available, excited, curious, and just a very easy person to connect to.”
With the possibility of romance between Morgan and Sasha excised in Season 2, Lupe hailed the evolution of the pair’s bond.
“I liked the way that it evolved into something with that same underlying companionship that was in the first season,” she said. “But when the sexual tension was off the table, it became more of just us relating to each other and being vulnerable with each other in a way that neither of us really are with other people in our lives. It kind of carried the essence of what was there before and deepened it a little bit, it wasn’t as naggy or as kind of flirty, and it felt a little bit more like direct connection and direct vulnerability.”
Trying to find other examples for that bond proved difficult, Lupe said. When I offered up Joey and Phoebe on “Friends,” Lupe answered with a confession. “I haven’t seen ‘Friends,’ believe it or not. I know! I know. It’s terrible,” she said. “It’s one of those things where it just feels so insurmountable at this time.”
Funnily enough, this season of “Nobody Wants This” felt closer to an ensemble series like “Friends,” with everyone getting their own juicy little subplots (again: Dr. Andy and Morgan, Esther and Sasha).
‘Nobody Wants This’ERIN SIMKIN/NETFLIX
“With the rom-com structure, there is a beginning and an end, and in order to sustain it over multiple seasons, you kind of have to expand out into the ensemble in order to keep it alive,” Lupe said. “There wasn’t a specific conversation that we had with the team, where they were like, ‘We’re going to give you more real estate,’ but it was exciting to see that they were playing around with our characters a little bit more. I’ve done a lot of these kinds of supporting parts, and I’ve just never been given this amount of real estate. This is a different thing, and it felt really exciting.”
Still, at the core of the series is Morgan’s relationship with Joanne. That’s the big love story of her life, at least for now. Asked about her relationship with Bell off-screen, Lupe beamed.
“She is someone who’s like, she’s on set, and then she’s deeply entrenched in her family. I’m a similar person,” Lupe said. “I feel really comfortable with her. I feel really familiar with her. I feel like I can be completely transparent with her about anything that I’m dealing with. There have been, truly, times where I’ve literally thought, ‘What would Kristen do in this moment?’ because she’s just so patient, fun, and thoughtful about the way that she parents and is also just a real team leader on set.”
She added, “There’s a relationship there that’s a substantial one, but it’s not like the kind of thing where we’re hanging out all the time in the way that Tim and I and our spouses all hang out, but it’s very familiar and I think that that translates.”
Bell also goes to bat for Lupe the way a real sister might, and the actress pointed to an experience she had with her co-star right before shooting on Season 2 kicked off.
“I had a movie that happened right before we did the second season, and it was basically overlapping with the season,” Lupe said. “And Kristen went above and beyond, and called everyone on set to push production a week, and was like, ‘We need to do whatever we can to make this possible for Justine’ because it was the first time that I’d ever had a leading role as a female in a movie. That’s something she didn’t have to do, and it was incredibly moving to me.”
Coming up in Season 3, a new co-star: Erin Foster herself, who is playing a currently undisclosed role in the series she created (loosely about her own life!).
“She’s clearly very excited about it, and she picked a part that’s really appropriate for her to be doing,” Lupe said. “The thing that I was most moved by was just how high the stakes were for her. She was really concerned about doing a good job and really wanted to memorize the crap out of it and make sure that she was super-prepared, asking for tips, and asking for coaching from Kristen. I didn’t get to see it, but I did hear that she was really great and really fun, so I’m really excited to see it.”
Is there anything else we might get out of her? Another romance for Morgan, maybe?
“I can’t tell you anything,” Lupe said with a laugh, before literally closing her lips, a natural bit of physical comedy from the actress. “I’m telling you! No, I can’t say anything. I want you to be totally surprised. I was kind of shocked that Erin even said that she was going to be on the show. So, I’ll stay tight-lipped about it, but what I can tell you is — and [the showrunners] have been very open about it — they wanted the feeling of this season to be champagne. They want it to be fun and lively, and so that’s the only kind of clue that I can give, is champagne.”
Here’s to more Morgan.
Season 1 and Season 2 of “Nobody Wants This” are now streaming on Netflix. Season 3 will be released later this year.