Erin and Sara Foster on turning their reality into rom-com gold
At 35 years old, Erin Foster was single and didn't want to be. After what felt like a lifetime of dating, she was hoping to settle down and build a life with someone. Never in a million years though, could she have imagined the road to her future family would include converting to Judaism — or creating a comedy series loosely based on her experiences.
But this week, Foster and her sister frequent collaborator Sara are watching as their rom-com series, Nobody Wants This, starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, begins streaming on Netflix. Bell stars as Joanne, a bright, funny and successful Angeleno who hosts a weekly podcast with her sister Morgan, played by Justine Lupe. After a chance encounter at a dinner party with newly single rabbi Noah (Brody), Joanne’s romantic life — and her historic attraction to only the most toxic of males — is upended by a person who challenges her entire belief system. The major conflict? Noah is set on marrying a woman who is Jewish, and Joanne is emphatically not.
The series is a hilarious meditation on what it means to commit to someone from an entirely different world from your own. It explores relationships — across family, faith, and romantic partners — with poignance, wit and grace. The chemistry between Bell and Brody is electric, and the show is worth watching for the comedic performances by Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn alone.
These days, life is sweet for Erin Foster. She’s found success: she and Sara created and starred in the VH1 reality-TV parody series Barely Famous, are co-hosts of The World’s First Podcast, and founded a clothing line, Favorite Daughter, in 2020. In 2019, she married Simon Tikhman, and this past May, after years of struggling with infertility, they welcomed their first child, a daughter named Noa. This new show is icing on the cake.
Earlier this summer, Harper’s Bazaar sat down with the Foster sisters to talk about the show’s inception, Erin’s real-life inspiration for the series, and the dating advice they’d give their viewers – and maybe their younger selves, too.
What compelled you to tell the story in this way? What made you think this could be ripe for television?
Erin Foster: I would say that the best writing comes from personal experience because you can speak to a unique perspective that you have in the situation. I’m not always great at seeing the things I’m going through in my life as stories to tell for TV. Sara’s more the business side of things, like, “This could make us money.”
Sara Foster: I’m the one that goes, “Ooh, if we go get this person, and if we align with that person, this network will buy it, and then we’ll get this number of episodes.”
Erin: I’m just living my life. You know? I had always grown up around a lot of Jewish friends and never was attached to a religion myself. When I met Simon, he said it would be important to him to marry someone Jewish and asked me if I would convert. It was kind of like, “Yeah. Whatever. I’ll be Jewish.” It didn’t really mean anything to me at the time. It was sort of like, “Yeah, sure, all my friends are Jewish.”
Sara: I’m just excited that this guy wants to take it to the next level with me. So I don’t care. I’ll be a Scientologist. I’m just ready for someone to be down to commit.
Erin: 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.
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. 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.
We thought it would be ripe territory for a relationship show, looking at and analysing challenges in a relationship that felt very true to life, and not these sort of blown-out-of-proportion, manufactured challenges.
There are so many great little moments of conflict that are funny and interesting to watch as they play out between the characters on the show. How much of that was pulled from real life? And Sara, do you remember in real-time watching your sister go through this and having any opinions of your own?
Sara: My memory was that Erin has never connected to religion. She had this narrative about herself for all these years. [To Erin.] I don’t want to speak for you, but you’re like, “I’m an atheist.” Or, “I’m not an atheist but I don’t connect…”
Erin: More agnostic.
Sara: “I don’t connect to organised religion.” Watching her through this process, we saw her really connect to something for the first time. At the root of, I think, what she learned is that family is everything. That Friday nights are really for family to be together. Through that, I started going, “Oh, this is interesting to me.” And so it was nothing but a total positive experience. And then it made them closer.
Erin: Also, being with someone, I think … Sara, not to speak for her, but for both of us, meeting Simon, he just comes from such a different world. He believes in things. Take religion out of it, he’s just …
Sara: He’s an optimist.
Erin: That was something that I really wanted to create. There’s so much content out there, so many films and TV shows where men write women the way that they think women should be. And women usually watch and think, 'That’s not what women are like'. We don’t say things like that. And we’re not begging to give blow jobs under the table all the time. That’s just not who we are – that’s who you want us to be.
So I really wanted to even things out and write a man the way that women really want men to be, which is emotionally intelligent, funny and charismatic, but confident, and having conviction. Being an alpha, but also being emotionally available.
At the end of the first episode, when they’re all at temple, I think Noah’s mom says something along the lines of, “She’s a shiksa,” in reference to Joanne. Did you have any of those real moments of confrontation with Simon’s family in your early days?
Erin: There was a moment early on in our relationship where I went to temple for the first time with his parents in San Francisco. I was really stressed throughout the process because I was sort of bored. I had no connection to temple, and a lot of the service was in Hebrew, and there were a lot of prayers, and standing up, and sitting down, and I was kind of like, “Oh my God.” I didn’t know how religious they were. And I thought, “Is this going to be the rest of my life, pretending like I’m having the time of my life at temple?”
I got in the car afterwards and Simon’s mom said, “What did you think of the sermon?” I was 36 years old at this point. I’m a fully formed adult. I’m thinking people want honesty. They’ll respect that. And I said, “It was okay. I didn’t think it was that great.” The silence in this car, you could cut with a knife. It was really tense. She was not looking for honesty. She was looking for me to tell her how amazing the sermon was.
His parents weren’t really used to someone being so unfiltered, and uncensored, and saying how I feel all the time. That was not something that they were used to, and I wasn’t really used to being with parents where you have to be careful what you say and not swear around them. There was an adjustment period where they were like, “This is the person you chose to bring into our family? Are you okay, Simon? What are you thinking?”
Sara: You are not the dream.
Erin: 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. I didn’t show up at temple and she saw me for the first time.
Sara: There are very few parallels. I mean, the overall concept of converting, but the dynamics are all very different.
In terms of the dynamics between the sisters on the show, how did you two decide what that relationship would look like between Morgan and Joanne?
Erin: I think you have to take creative license with things to create more tension. Sara was really supportive of me when I got together with Simon. From the very beginning, it’s always been a seamless little throuple that we’re in, the three of us. She and Simon have been really close since the beginning, but that’s not as interesting for TV. We needed to create more conflict there.
You have Kristen Bell and Adam Brody in the lead roles, and the casting is truly amazing all around. Timothy Simons as Sasha, Noah’s brother, is genius. Were those the actors you always envisioned? What were you looking for when casting?
Erin: I didn’t want a trope-y thing. 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.” They have worked with her many times before, and they are obsessed with her. They love her.
Sara: It wasn’t even a conversation.
Erin: It was like, “This is who it’s going to be.” And I was like, “Amazing. Let’s meet.” And 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." And second of all, I said to her, “The truth is, I want to be a mom. I’m trying to get pregnant, and that’s really my life focus right now, becoming a mom. I don’t want to be sitting in a hair and make-up trailer at 5:00 am.”
Sara: Every day, Erin would look at me and she’d be like, “I am so happy I am not in this.”
Erin: Truly, because I think 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.
You two do so much together beyond this. You’re sisters. You have Favorite Daughter and your podcast. You have such an incredible dynamic. Was it a no-brainer to take this on together, to co-produce? Are you always on the same page? It’s such an interesting thing, mixing family and business, but you guys seem to do it so beautifully.
Sara: We have a really, really good flow with our dynamic, because what we’ve learned is, we really know my skill sets and we really know Erin’s skill sets. We really know where each of us thrive and excel, and so we’re at a point now where we divide and conquer. All of it is sort of under the umbrella of us, but this is very much Erin’s show. Very much so. I mean, I feel like I was pretty instrumental in getting it made, but that’s the beauty of this. While she’s on set every day, I’m at the Favorite Daughter offices trying to build the business and grow the company. And she’s going, “Thank you so much for taking that on, I’ll be back soon.”
Erin: Sara had to absorb a lot of our work stuff. I mean, the writers’ room and on set is a full-time job. I was also pregnant throughout all this, right? So there were days where I was sick, five months pregnant, doing the writers’ room from 9 to 6, and then coming home and recording a podcast with Sara, which was really challenging.
But at the same time, Sara’s taking tons of meetings for our fund, Sara’s going downtown and being in our Favorite Daughter fittings, Sara’s travelling to New York for parts of the Favorite Daughter business. So we really had to divide and conquer. We did some fittings at the writers’ room, which was really funny. We literally had models in the writers’ room before the day would start. From 8 to 10am when the writers got there, we’d have a model doing prototype reviews. And I had to warn the writers, “Be aware, there will be a five-foot-ten, beautiful model here when you get to work. She’s not replacing you.” We really just had to jump in together and cover for each other.
Sara: It’s taken us time to get here. When we did Barely Famous, we hadn’t figured out each other’s sort of … what’s the word I’m looking for? Not strengths, but sort of positions. We didn’t know yet. It’s taken us a lot of time to get into this flow where it really just works, where we have open communication, which is numero uno.
The whole show is so much fun, and it really is so delightful to watch — but it’s also about something more. It’s about bringing these two worlds together. Especially right now in this world, it feels really sweet and important to see. Was the intention for it to always kind of have a bigger purpose or a bigger meaning?
Erin: For sure. I think falling in love is a religious experience, and growing and evolving for someone is … it opens your world up. [In one episode] Joanne thinks the way to land this guy is to be cool, and fun, and aloof, and not too invested, and he’s actually looking for a real connection. And that is something that happened in my relationship with Simon — he sort of stopped me in my tracks and was like, whatever this thing is you’re doing, I’m not really into it. I want you to be a real person, and I want you to tell me how you actually feel, and I want you to show up, and I need you to grow up a little bit and be an adult, and be a real person because that’s what I’m looking for.
When you’re a strong woman — like the three of us, we’re all strong women — you need a really specific type of partner that can match your strength, but also diffuse it when it’s necessary, and that moment was super important to me at the end of episode four, because you have this guy willing to be vulnerable and say, “It might not be cool, but I’m looking for something real.” And that confidence breaks her walls down and forces her to then say the truth.
Sara: We’re in the era of embracing and normalising vulnerability from men, I think. I think we were raised associating that with being weak, or being a little bitch, or being whatever. And that’s just over. That’s not healthy. I want my daughters to gravitate towards men who are vulnerable and who are connected to their feelings, not these players who play games and mess with our heads. Erin and I, that’s what our whole podcast is about, about how those types of guys ruined our 20s.
What would be your advice to women watching this show — young and old — about marriage and family?
Erin: We have these ideas of what is romantic, and we think it’s someone who looks a certain way, or has a certain cachet, or certain power in the world, or is going to make our friends envious of our lives. But the truth is, the most romantic thing is finding someone who really sees you and helps you be the best version of yourself, over and over and over again. And where you can falter and you can make a mistake and they aren’t punishing, and they help you continue to rise to the occasion, and you can do the same for them.
I had always been taught by society that something that feels safe is boring and something that feels really unstable is exciting and addicting. But the truth is, now, from where I’m sitting, I’m addicted to feeling safe. That is the best possible outcome, finding someone that makes you feel safe, but also has their own boundaries and has strength in who they are. I wish that I had known that at 27 and not 37.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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