Key Points
EW has an exclusive preview of Leighton Meester on The World’s First Podcast With Erin & Sara Foster.
The Gossip Girl alum says she forgets Adam Brody is her husband while watching his work.
Meester joins Brody and Kristen Bell on season 2 of Netflix’s Nobody Wants This.
Adam who?
Leighton Meester may have been married to her Nobody Wants This costar Adam Brody for more than a decade, but the years just slip away when she watches him act.
“When I watch him in anything he does, I really do forget it’s him. And then I’ll look over and be like, ‘Oh right, that’s my husband,'” Meester tells hosts Erin and Sara Foster on Thursday’s episode of Dear Media’s World’s First Podcast, which Entertainment Weekly is exclusively previewing.
“When I was watching this season, I was so invested in their relationship I had to look away so I wouldn’t cry before work,” she shares with the sisters, both executive producers on the hit Netflix romantic dramedy series.
Erin, who created the Emmy-nominated series, asks Meester if Brody’s character, the kind-hearted rabbi Noah Roklov, “resonates so much because he’s such a real man?”
The Gossip Girl alum assents, calling Noah “a fully realized man who isn’t pandering to women. He’s straightforward, not fearful of a woman’s power, and I think that’s why people love him. He’s not a superhero – he’s a mensch. He’s attracted to strong women, not intimidated by them.”
Nobody Wants This proved to be a hit for Netflix when it premiered last September. The series follows the slow and halting coming together of Noah, reeling from a broken relationship, and Joanne (Kristen Bell), an agnostic podcaster with seemingly little in common with the spiritual leader.
Erin Simkin/Netflix
Kristen Bell, Adam Brody, and Leighton Meester in ‘Nobody Wants This’
Meester appears on a season 2 episode as Abby, a childhood pal whom Joanne still resents for cutting the hair of her American Girl Doll. Now a mommy influencer on Instagram, Abby and her husband call upon Noah to oversee a baby naming ceremony, which a vengeful Joanne also attends.
When asked if she gets nervous acting alongside Brody, Meester says it’s the opposite. “I feel so at ease and so comforted and relaxed and I feel like he’s encouraging me unconsciously and then I feel him thinking good things,” she shares.
“I just felt very comforted,” Meester says of her time on the Nobody Wants This set. “Adam too, he does come home and really have nice things to say about everybody and…feels very at home and safe there, too.”
Bell previously sung Meester’s praises for her work on the episode, telling EW, “I know Leighton’s extremely talented, but I did not anticipate what a comedic sniper she was gonna be. She is effervescent in that episode.”
The Veronica Mars and The Good Place star called the new season “so incestuous,” noting that Meester’s on-screen husband is played by Joe Gilette, the real-life partner of Jackie Tohn, who plays Noah’s sister-in-law.
Erin Simkin/Netflix
Kristen Bell as Joanne and Adam Brody as Noah on ‘Nobody Wants This’ season 2
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Meester and Brody first worked together on the 2011 film The Oranges, but met before that through a mutual colleague. Brody explained on a 2021 episode of Anna Faris’ Unqualified podcast that producer Josh Schwartz brought the cast of two of his shows together at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, just as The O.C. (Brody’s show) was ending and Gossip Girl (Meester’s) was beginning.
“He introduced all of us and then [I] bumped into her, like, two or three times over the next couple of years,” Brody explained. The couple married in 2014, welcoming their first child in 2015 and their second child in 2020.
Check out Meester’s full episode of The World’s First Podcast With Erin & Sara Foster — on which she also opens up about navigating fame, getting older in Hollywood, and her early career on Gossip Girl — when it drops on Thursday. Watch an exclusive preview above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly