How Erin Foster's real-life romance inspired 'Nobody Wants This'

Columnist

Sept. 28, 2024 3 AM PT

She didn’t spot any glaring red flags the first time she stalked his Instagram page. No photos of him boarding a private jet. Zero reels showing off bottle service sparklers. Nary a shirtless mirror selfie in sight.

Instead, what Erin Foster found as she scrolled through the account of the cute guy from her gym was disarmingly wholesome. Shots of him posing with his parents or playing on a local basketball team.

The photographic evidence led her to two possible conclusions: Either he was too good for her, or he was too nice — the kind of guy who’d fall all over himself trying to please her, causing her to inevitably get the ick.

A woman with blonde hair in a white sweater leans again the cushion of a white couch.

Her assumptions about Simon Tikhman would end up, thankfully, being incorrect. But Foster’s early social media investigation into her new crush did not uncover a big part of his identity: He was Jewish. That didn’t matter to her — but the fact that she was a gentile mattered to him.

Tikhman mentioned it the first time they ever hung out in 2018, chatting over juice after the gym — “so L.A.,” they say in unison, rolling their eyes. “Whoever I marry, she has to be Jewish,” he’d said.

The story of how the couple fell in love while grappling with their different cultural backgrounds would go on to serve as the inspiration for Foster’s new show, “Nobody Wants This.” The series, which debuted on Netflix this week, stars Adam Brody as Noah, a rabbi who catches feelings for sex-advice podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell.

Tikhman, 40, is not a spiritual leader — he co-founded a music management company. He doesn’t even consider himself particularly religious. But his parents fled the former Soviet Union in 1979 after being persecuted for being Jewish. When they settled in San Francisco, they instilled in Tikhman the notion that he had an obligation to continue the Jewish lineage.

“I really respect my parents and know the adversity they went through because they were Jewish,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”

Foster, meanwhile, had been raised without religion in a nontraditional family. Her father, the songwriter David Foster, has been married five times — his second wife was Erin’s mom, former model Rebecca Dyer, with whom he had three of his six children. One of the men her mother dated later was Jewish, and Foster says she enjoyed going to temple during that period more than church. A decade later, she opted to attend a few classes about Judaism with a friend who was trying to delve deeper into her religion.

So the idea of converting — it didn’t scare her. Because of her “complicated family structure,” Foster found herself craving the type of tradition she never grew up with.

A woman in red stares at a rabbi wearing a tallit and yarmulke

“A big part of what drew me to Simon was that he was someone who was funny and cool and modern, but he had a bit of an old-fashioned feel about him,” says Foster, 42. “He’ll be like, ‘Hey, we should go check in on that person, or ‘We need to go see your grandma.’ I didn’t grow up with etiquette around those things.”

It’s early afternoon when Tikhman arrives home to the couple’s West Hollywood apartment, only a seven-minute drive from his office, which is housed in the Live Nation building. They’ve been living here for two years while the home they bought in Hancock Park is renovated. It’s a modern, new build with top-end amenities, but their floor-to-ceiling windows also overlook a grocery store parking lot.

Before coming over to kiss Foster, Tikhman peeks his head into the nursery where the couple’s 4-month-old daughter, Noa, has just woken up from a nap. The baby was born in this very apartment in May, the result of 20 grueling rounds of IVF over six years. After the birth, Foster posted pictures on Instagram of herself laboring here in an inflatable tub.

Online and on “The World’s First Podcast,” which she hosts with her sister Sara, Foster is exceptionally open about her life. When Tikhman initially accepted Foster’s Instagram friend request — he strategically, and annoyingly, waited two days to do so — he wasn’t thrilled to learn that she was a public figure.

“It wasn’t an ideal situation,” he admits to thinking. “I’m just more of a private person.”

It wasn’t enough to stop him from dating her. But a few years later, when she told him she’d sold a TV show idea based on their love story, he freaked out. It was one thing if Foster was in the spotlight, but he didn’t want to be. So he asked her not to move forward with writing the show.

A woman wearing a miniature hat stares lovingly at a smiling man

It was 2022, and she hadn’t written a word in three years. After a brief acting stint in her 20s — her biggest part was a five-episode arc on “The O.C.” — Foster made a career shift in 2012, landing a job as a staff writer on Ryan Murphy’s NBC show “The New Normal.” She and her sister Sara went on to co-create the VH1 mockumentary series “Barely Famous,” spoofing their Hollywood-adjacent lives. It lasted two seasons, and then in 2018, Foster sold a pilot called “Daddy Issues” to 20th Century Fox. She starred opposite Don Johnson as a girl whose father starts dating her best friend; it didn’t get picked up.

So Foster pivoted again. She partnered with Sara, working as creative heads for Bumble and then co-launching a fashion line, Favorite Daughter. At 35, she met Tikhman. But being in a healthy relationship wasn’t exactly a font of inspiration. She’d always written about characters who self-sabotaged, who made the same mistakes over and over without getting to the root of their issues. Without that cynical worldview, her writer’s block overwhelmed her.

“When I met Simon, I really felt like I might have to choose between being happy with the person I was meant to be with, or being inspired,” she says. “Because there was nothing funny about what was happening.”

A woman in a white sweater, black skirt and boots leans against a white couch.

That changed when she started going through the conversion process, which took place over 10 weeks at American Jewish University. Toward the end of the journey, she faced questions from a trio of rabbis about her intentions:

Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not easy being Jewish.

Are you ready to be hated by people?

If someone is being antisemitic and asks who is Jewish, are you going to stand up?

If you and your husband get divorced, will you keep being Jewish?

They were inquiries she’d never pondered before. She quickly nodded and agreed, but the quandaries stuck with her. It sparked her creativity for the first time in years, and soon she’d sold “Nobody Wants This” to Fox. (It was originally called “Shiksa,” a word that Brody’s character describes as an old Yiddish insult that “these days, just means you’re a hot, blonde non-Jew.”)

The only thing was, she never ran it past Tikhman.

“He was like, ‘Sorry, you sold a show about what?’” Foster recalls. “I immediately panicked. I hadn’t even considered it [being a problem]. To me, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m taking our story and turning it into something cool. You’re welcome.’ And he had a different point of view.”

“I’m from a very private family,” Tikhman says, reiterating his perspective. “My mom would always tell us stories about how if you said the wrong thing in the Soviet Union as a Jew, you could be taken to jail.”

Fearful that the show could harm her relationship, Foster started trying to wish it away. She dragged her feet on a pilot script, hoping that the producers might just forget about the idea eventually. They didn’t.

But one of the EPs, Steve Levitan — the creator of “Modern Family” — had a script suggestion that helped to solve some of Foster’s problems. Noah was initially written to be a lot more like Tikhman, leaving Levitan unsure whether the stakes between a Jew and gentile who fall in love were high enough for a TV audience. A rabbi and a gentile who fall in love? Now there was some real conflict.

It also helped that Tikhman’s parents were totally on board, despite their son’s fears. She spent hours on the phone with his dad talking about potential storylines, and later during filming, she put her mother-in-law in the background of a scene shot at Sinai Temple.

“Also, this is what Erin’s supposed to be doing,” Tikhman says now. “She’s a writer and she’s incredible at it. I was sitting here the other day watching an episode and thinking, ‘I wish I was as good as this character.’ ”

A blonde woman in a white sweater leans against a tan cushion.

The obsession with Brody’s hot rabbi will no doubt rival the early 2000s fan frenzy over Seth Cohen, his character who was a core of “The O.C.” He’s emotionally available, almost immediately telling Bell’s character that he’s interested in a serious relationship with her. He pulls out chairs, listens to her podcast to get to know her better, buys flowers for her mother. And he teaches her about Jewish traditions in a way that’s not condescending, like taking her outside to see the stars to mark the end of Shabbat.

Not all of that happened in real life, but Foster says the core of the character is true to Tikhman’s essence. Like when she had a 24-hour work trip booked to Dallas and Tikhman said he’d join. Foster was confused — it was such a short trip.

“He goes, ‘Doesn’t your grandma live there? I’ve never met her and I need to,’ ” says Foster, who hadn’t even been planning to see her. Plus, the couple had barely been dating four months. But sure enough, Tikhman came, they all met and soon, he and grandma were talking on the phone a couple of times a week.

Foster genuinely seems to view her spouse in an exalted light — frequently referencing his “goodness” or how much “better” he is than her. Predictably, this drives him crazy.

“Simon just exudes this energy that I assumed wouldn’t match up with mine — that I’d be too negative,” she says. “In my past, if I ever chose someone who was good, they were too soft for me — too sweet or a pushover. And Simon is not sweet in a wimpy way. He has a feminist soul with a masculine energy.”

As if on cue, the couple’s new nanny walks over with Noa; the caretaker just started two days ago and speaks Russian, which they hope their daughter will eventually learn.

“This is my other girl,” Tikhman says proudly, pinching the child’s cheek.

The reason Foster talks so much about him — about how happy their family makes her — is that she wasn’t always sure this was in the cards for her. She did, after all, date Chad Michael Murray in her 20s.

But for a long time, she enjoyed being single. She liked flirting and reveled in her routines — drinking her morning coffee in solace in her breakfast nook. She wondered who she’d ever want to give that up for, who she could deal with in her space all the time.

“I didn’t think it was possible, and I had gotten kind of OK with that,” she says. “And now I have to stop myself from going over and sitting in his lap. I’m obsessed with Simon; he’s my muse. And this show is like a love letter to him.”