She might be the star of Netflix’s latest rom-com series Nobody Wants This, but Kristen Bell wasn’t Erin Foster, the creator and producer of the show’s first choice of leading lady.

‘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”,’ Foster, who initially wrote the role of Joanne with the intention of playing it herself, told Harper’s Bazaar. ‘They have worked with her many times before, and they are obsessed with her. They love her.’

Foster continued: ‘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”.’

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Nobody Wants This, which was filmed in and around Los Angeles in March 2024, was also entering production at the same time as Foster trying to conceive her first baby with her husband, marking another obstacle to her playing the role. ‘I said to her [Kristen Bell], “The truth is, I want to be a mum. I’m trying to get pregnant, and that’s really my life focus right now, becoming a mum. I don’t want to be sitting in a hair and make-up trailer at 5am”,’ Foster stated.

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She added: ‘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”.’

Nobody Wants This centres on the unlikely relationship between sex podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Rabbi Noah (Adam Brody), who meet at a mutual friend’s dinner party. Foster has called the series a ‘love letter’ to her marriage, with the story of Joanne and Noah loosely based on her experience of falling for her now-husband, who is the son of Jewish Russian émigrés.