Adam Brody and “Nobody Wants This” creator Erin Foster reveal how they crafted that perfect first kiss

"In the script, it says, 'It's the best kiss of her life' or 'It's the best kiss of all time' or something," Brody tells EW. "It set a high bar."

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Nobody Wants This.

The first kiss is a crucial moment in romantic storytelling — so the Nobody Wants This team  took incredible care to deliver one that's unforgettable.

At the end of the second episode of Netflix's new rom-com series, podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and progressive rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) embark on a charmingly low-key first date, wherein they both insist they're not on a date and try to convince themselves that they'd never work as a couple. As they're awkwardly hugging goodbye, Joanne remarks, "Isn't it crazy that we never kissed this whole time?" Noah responds, "Yeah, I'm very aware we haven't kissed."

"Yet? But we're just friends!" Joanne says. "Sure, and friends don't kiss, which is why, you know, I'm aware we haven't," Noah shoots back. They flirt with the idea of allowing a single goodbye kiss, and Noah tells Joanne to hand over her ice cream and drop her bag. It's then that Bell and Brody deliver one of the most satisfying, goosebump-inducing kiss scenes in recent memory.

Creator Erin Foster, whose real-life conversion to Judaism inspired the series, understood the impact that a great first kiss can have. "It was really important to me to have a really cool, playful first kiss for them," she tells Entertainment Weekly. "When I was writing, I kept thinking of Good Will Hunting," she explains, referring to the first kiss between Matt Damon's Will and Minnie Driver's Skylar. "When they go on their first date and they're having hamburgers and french fries and they have food on their face, and they're like, 'Let's do the first kiss. Let's just do it now and get it out of the way.' I found it to be such a different kind of first kiss, and it was still so romantic, but conversational and realistic and fun and flirty."

Foster sought to capture the down-to-Earth, honest romanticism of the Good Will Hunting scene in a new way. "I really wanted to just create a moment that gave you those kinds of anticipatory, exciting feelings," she says. "And there's not a ton of ways left to have first kisses in a show. People have done it a lot of different ways. So it's hard to not land on something that feels familiar."

Related: Adam Brody and Erin Foster preview their culture-clash rom-com Nobody Wants This

The showrunner had lofty expectations for how Nobody Wants This' first kiss would play out. "The kiss was very early in shooting, and the most challenging thing about it is that in the script, it says, 'It's the best kiss of her life' or 'It's the best kiss of all time' or something," Brody tells EW. "It set a high bar. So we were concerned with, 'How will this read?'"

However, Brody says that he and Bell didn't overthink the assignment. "It all felt pretty natural," he explains. "There wasn't a lot of premeditation about it."

Part of what makes the scene so effective is Noah's polite, matter-of-fact insistence as he prepares Joanne for the big moment — but those details almost didn't make it into the scene. "I pushed very hard to have Adam's character tell her to put her ice cream down, tell her to put her bag down," Foster recalls. "Like, 'All right, you want a first kiss? I'm about to give you the best f---ing kiss of your life.' And I had to really fight for that moment to be in the script because some people didn't understand it. But if you're going to have a guy who's very sensitive and emotionally available and sweet and soft in so many ways, then he has to have conviction and he has to know what he wants and go after it. And he has to tell you to put your bag down and boss you around a little bit."

Related: Adam Brody calls out anti-woke celebrities: 'There are so much bigger fish to fry'

The scene also gets a major boost from a pitch-perfect needle drop, as Francis & the Lights' "See Her Out (That's Just Life)" kicks into gear the second the characters' lips meet. The track wasn't chosen by Foster, though, nor was it a selection from the series' music supervisor Este Haim. "One of our editors, Keenan Hiett, put music in his first pass in the first edit, and that's the song that he put in right away in the very, very, very first cut," Foster says. "And it just murdered. We thought for a while that we weren't going to be able to get the rights to it." The team experimented with other song selections, but nothing felt quite right. "Keenan's original idea was always the best, and I'm so happy that we were able to keep it."

Related: The 24 best meet-cutes in rom-com history

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

In an era when attitudes about onscreen intimacy are changing and blockbusters are pointedly refusing to let their characters kiss, the Nobody Wants This team is emphatically in favor of making out. "I think kisses are very important," Foster says. "When it comes to romantic moments, you have two choices as a creator of a show: You can either give the ending people want and hope to have, or you withhold it as an artistic choice. And I don't think withholding it gives the audience the satisfaction that they're looking for. I think it's okay to satisfy the audience — it doesn't necessarily mean that it stops being art."

Brody feels similarly. "I'm pro kiss, I'm Team Kiss, if for no other reason than it's very cinematic," he says. "It's a beautiful thing to look at. It's a beautiful silhouette, and it ultimately suggests the creation of life. I'm also pro-intimacy coordinator. I think that's been a good positive addition as well. But the kiss is a staple for a reason."

Nobody Wants This is now streaming on Netflix.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.