In ‘Nobody Wants This,’ Adam Brody Keeps the Faith

Adam Brody’s bar mitzvah was held six months late. It was barely held at all. This was in San Diego, Calif., in the early 1990s, and Brody, who spent most of his free time surfing, attended Hebrew school only under duress. He knew few other Jews.

“I wanted long, straight blond hair,” he said. “All my idols were named Shane.”

A decade later, after a cursory stint at community college, an impulsive move to Los Angeles, a handful of television one-offs and a brief arc on “Gilmore Girls,” Brody became the most famous Jewish (well, half Jewish) high schooler in America. (He was actually 23, which made the fandom a little tricky.) Starring as Seth Cohen on the sun-kissed teen romantic dramedy “The O.C.,” he played a curly-haired heartthrob, responsible for introducing the holiday portmanteau “Chrismukkah” into the lexicon.

Josh Schwartz, a creator of “The O.C.” put a lot of himself into Seth. But Brody, he said in an interview, brought charisma and a surfer cool to a character who could have come off as merely nerdy. “He’s an aspirational Jew,” Schwartz joked of Brody.

The “O.C.” ended four years later. (Beachy TV can accommodate only so many car crashes and love triangles, and 20-somethings can’t play teens forever.) Brody worked steadily for the next two decades, darting between film and television. Mostly he played variations on a theme, the nice guy, although they aren’t always so nice. As he reminded me over lunch in Santa Monica, “I’ve played my fair share of rapists and murderers.”

But Brody’s gift is for comedy — comedy flecked with emotional complication. He reminded viewers of this in the 2022 limited series “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” in which he plays another aspirational Jew, a likable finance guy. (This is harder than it looks.) He is now the star of “Nobody Wants This,” a Netflix romantic comedy about Noah (Brody), a Los Angeles rabbi, who falls for Joanne (Kristen Bell), an outspoken non-Jewish podcaster. It premieres on Sept. 26.