Entertainment
How Erin Foster's real-life romance inspired 'Nobody Wants This'
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.
Erin Foster, the creator of Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This,” at her home in West Hollywood this month.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
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.
Kristen Bell and Adam Brody star in “Nobody Wants This,” which is loosely based on Erin Foster’s own love life.
(Stefania Rosini / Netflix)
“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.
“Simon is not sweet in a wimpy way. He has a feminist soul with a masculine energy,” Foster says of her husband.
(Courtesy of Erin Foster)
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.”
“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,” Erin Foster says.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
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 easing 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.’ ”
“He was like, ‘Sorry, you sold a show about what?’’ ” Erin Foster recalls her husband, Simon Tikhman, saying. “I immediately panicked. I hadn’t even considered it [being a problem].”
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
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. She cites an example: When they’d been dating for only four months, she had a work trip booked to Dallas for 24 hours. Tikhman found out and 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. 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.”
Entertainment
House committee report questions distribution of FireAid’s $100 million for L.A. wildfire relief
The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday released a report after its own investigation into FireAid, the charity founded by Clippers executives that raised $100 million for wildfire relief efforts in Los Angeles last January.
The investigation — led by Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) under committee chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — began in August when Kiley “sent a letter to FireAid requesting a detailed breakdown of all non-profits that received money from FireAid.” Kiley expressed concern that the money had gone toward local nonprofits rather than as more direct aid to affected residents.
FireAid promptly released a comprehensive document detailing its fundraising and grant dispersals. After reaching out to every named nonprofit in the document, The Times reported that the groups who successfully applied for grants were quickly given money to spend in their areas of expertise, as outlined in FireAid’s public mission statements. A review conducted by an outside law firm confirmed the same.
The new Republican-led committee report is skeptical of the nonprofit work done under FireAid’s auspices — but cites relatively few examples of groups deviating from FireAid’s stated goals.
Representatives for FireAid did not immediately respond to request for comment on the report.
Out of hundreds of nonprofits given millions in FireAid funds, “In total, the Committee found six organizations that allocated FireAid grants towards labor, salaries, or other related costs,” the report said.
The committee singled out several local nonprofits, focused on relief and development for minorities and marginalized groups, for criticism. It named several long-established organizations like the NAACP Pasadena, My Tribe Rise, Black Music Action Coalition, CA Native Vote Project and Community Organized Relief Efforts (CORE), whose activities related to fire relief they found “unclear,” without providing specific claims of misusing FireAid funds.
The report — while heavily citing Fox News, Breitbart and New York Post stories — claims that “FireAid prioritized and awarded grants to illegal aliens.” Yet its lone example for this is a grant that went to CORE, citing its mission for aiding crisis response within “underserved communities,” one of which is “undocumented migrants” facing “high risk of housing instability, economic hardship, exploitation, and homelessness.”
The report said that $500,000 was used by the California Charter Schools Assn., Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, LA Disaster Relief Navigator, Community Clinic Assn. of Los Angeles County and LA Conservation Corps “towards labor, salaries, or other related costs,” which the committee said went against FireAid’s stated goals.
Yet the examples they cite as suspicious include NLSLA using its FireAid grant to pay salaries to attorneys providing free legal aid to fire victims, the Community Clinic of Los Angeles “expanding training in mental health and trauma care” through grants to smaller local health centers, and the L.A. Regional Food bank allocating its funds to “mobilize resources to fight hunger.”
The report singled out one group, Altadena Talks Foundation, from Team Rubicon relief worker Toni Raines. Altadena Talks Foundation received a $100,00 grant from FireAid, yet the report said Altadena Talks’ work on a local news podcast, among other efforts, “remains unclear” as it relates to fire relief.
The report’s claims that “instead of helping fire victims, donations made to FireAid helped to fund causes and projects completely unrelated to fire recovery, including voter participation for Native Americans, illegal aliens, podcast shows, and fungus planting” sound incendiary. Yet the evidence it cites generally shows a range of established local nonprofits addressing community-specific concerns in a fast-moving disaster, with some small amounts of money possibly going toward salaries or overhead, or groups whose missions the committee viewed skeptically.
FireAid still plans to distribute an additional round of $25 million in grants this year.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: A Home Invasion turns into a “Relentless” Grudge Match
I’d call the title “Relentless” truth in advertising, althought “Pitiless,” “Endless” and “Senseless” work just as well.
This new thriller from the sarcastically surnamed writer-director Tom Botchii (real name Tom Botchii Skowronski of “Artik” fame) begins in uninteresting mystery, strains to become a revenge thriller “about something” and never gets out of its own way.
So bloody that everything else — logic, reason, rationale and “Who do we root for?” quandary is throughly botched — its 93 minutes pass by like bleeding out from screwdriver puncture wounds — excruciatingly.
But hey, they shot it in Lewiston, Idaho, so good on them for not filming overfilmed Greater LA, even if the locations are as generically North American as one could imagine.

Career bit player and Lewiston native Jeffrey Decker stars as a homeless man we meet in his car, bearded, shivering and listening over and over again to a voice mail from his significant other.
He has no enthusiasm for the sign-spinning work he does to feed himself and gas up his ’80s Chevy. But if woman, man or child among us ever relishes anything as much as this character loves his cigarettes — long, theatrical, stair-at-the-stars drags of ecstacy — we can count ourselves blessed.
There’s this Asian techie (Shuhei Kinoshita) pounding away at his laptop, doing something we assume is sketchy just by the “ACCESS DENIED” screens he keeps bumping into and the frantic calls he takes suggesting urgency of some sort or other.
That man-bunned stranger, seen in smoky silhoutte through the opaque window on his door, ringing the bell of his designer McMansion makes him wary. And not just because the guy’s smoking and seems to be making up his “How we can help cut your energy bill” pitch on the fly.
Next thing our techie knows, shotgun blasts are knocking out the lock (Not the, uh GLASS) and a crazed, dirty beardo homeless guy has stormed in, firing away at him as he flees and cries “STOP! Why are you doing this?”
Jun, as the credits name him, fights for his PC and his life. He wins one and loses the other. But tracking his laptop and homeless thug “Teddy” with his phone turns out to be a mistake.
He’s caught, beaten and bloodied some more. And that’s how Jun learns the beef this crazed, wronged man has with him — identity theft, financial fraud, etc.
Threats and torture over access to that laptop ensue, along with one man listing the wrongs he’s been done as he puts his hostage through all this.
Wait’ll you get a load of what the writer-director thinks is the card our hostage would play.
The dialogue isn’t much, and the logic — fleeing a fight you’ve just won with a killer rather than finishing him off or calling the cops, etc. — doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.
The set-piece fights, which involve Kinoshita screaming and charging his tormentor and the tormentor played by Decker stalking him with wounded, bloody-minded resolve are visceral enough to come off. Decker and Kinoshita are better than the screenplay.
A throw-down at a gas-station climaxes with a brutal brawl on the hood of a bystander’s car going through an automatic car wash. Amusingly, the car-wash owners feel the need to do an Idaho do-si-do video (“Roggers (sic) Car Wash”) that plays in front of the car being washed and behind all the mayhem the antagonists and the bystander/car owner go through. Not bad.
The rest? Not good.
Perhaps the good folks at Rogers Motors and Car Wash read the script and opted to get their name misspelled. Smart move.

Rating: R, graphic violence, smoking, profanity
Cast: Jeffrey Decker, Shuhei Kinoshita
Credits:Scripted and directed by Tom Botchii.. A Saban Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:34
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Entertainment
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas breaks out in ‘Sentimental Value.’ But she isn’t interested in fame
One of the most moving scenes in Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” happens near the end. During an intense moment between sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who have both had to reckon with the unexpected return of their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), Agnes suddenly tells Nora, “I love you.” In a family in which such direct, vulnerable declarations are rare, Agnes’ comment is both a shock and a catharsis.
The line wasn’t scripted or even discussed. Lilleaas was nervous about spontaneously saying it while filming. But it just came out.
“[In] Norwegian culture, we don’t talk so much about what we’re feeling,” explains Lilleaas, who lives in Oslo but is sitting in the Chateau Marmont lounge on a rainy afternoon in mid-November. If the script had contained that “I love you” line, she says, “It would’ve been like, ‘What? I would never say that. That’s too much.’ But because it came out of a genuine feeling in the moment — I don’t know how to describe it, but it was what I felt like I would want to say, and what I would want my own sister to know.”
Since its Cannes premiere, “Sentimental Value” has been lauded for such scenes, which underline the subtle force of this intelligent tearjerker about a frayed family trying to repair itself. And the film’s breakthrough performance belongs to the 36-year-old Lilleaas, who has worked steadily in Norway but not often garnered international attention.
Touted as a possible supporting actress Oscar nominee, Lilleaas in person is reserved but thoughtful, someone who prefers observing the people around her rather than being in the spotlight. Fitting, then, that in “Sentimental Value” she plays the quiet, levelheaded sister serving as the mediator between impulsive Nora and egotistical Gustav. Lilleaas has become quite adept at doing a lot while seemingly doing very little.
“In acting school, some of the best characters I did were mute,” she notes. “They couldn’t express language, but they were very expressive. It was freeing to not have a voice. Agnes, she’s present a lot of the time but doesn’t necessarily have that many lines. To me, that’s freedom — the [dialogue] very often comes in the way of that.”
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in “Sentimental Value.”
(Kasper Tuxen)
Lilleaas hadn’t met Trier before her audition, but they instantly bonded over the challenges of raising young kids. And she sparked to the script’s examination of parents and children. Unlike restless Nora, Agnes is married with a son, able to view her deeply flawed dad from the vantage point of both a daughter and mother. Lilleaas shares her character’s sympathy for the inability of different generations to connect.
“A lot of parents and children’s relationships stop at a point,” she says. “It doesn’t evolve like a romantic relationship, [where] the mindset is to grow together. With families, it’s ‘You’re the child, I’m the parent.’ But you have to grow together and accept each other. And that’s difficult.”
Spend time with Lilleaas and you’ll notice she discusses acting in terms of human behavior rather than technique. In fact, she initially studied psychology. “I’ve always been interested in the [experience] of being alive,” she says. “Tremendous grief is very painful, but you can only experience that if you have great love. I’ve tried the more psychological approach of studying people, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Acting is the perfect medium for me to explore life.”
Other out-of-towners might be disappointed to arrive in sunny Southern California only to be greeted by storm clouds, but Lilleaas is sanguine about the situation. “I could have been at the beach, but it’s fine,” she says, amused, looking out the nearby windows. “I can go to the movies — it’s perfect movie weather.”
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. (Evelyn Freja / For The Times)
Her measured response to both her Hollywood ascension and a rainy forecast speak to her generally unfussed demeanor. During our conversation, Lilleaas’ candor and lack of vanity are striking. How often does a rising star talk about being happy when a filmmaker gives her fewer lines? Or fantasize about a life after acting?
“Some days I’ll be like, ‘I want to give it up. I want to have a small farm,’” she admits. “We lived on a farm and had horses and chickens when I grew up. I miss that. But at the same time, I need to be in an urban environment.”
She gives the matter more thought, sussing out her conflicted feelings. “Maybe as I grow older and have children, I feel this need to go back to something that’s familiar and safe,” she suggests. “I think that’s why I’m searching for small farms [online] — that’s, like, a dream thing. I need some dreams that they’re not reality — it’s a way to escape.”
Lilleaas may have decided against becoming a psychologist, but she’s always interrogating her motivations. This desire for a farm is her latest self-exploration, clarifying for her that she loves her profession but not the superficial trappings that accompany it.
“Ten years ago, this would maybe have been a dream, what’s happening now,” she says, gesturing at her swanky surroundings. “But you realize what you want to focus on and give value. I don’t necessarily want to give this that much value. I appreciate it and everything, but I don’t want to put my heart in it, because I know that it goes up and down and it’s not constant. I put my heart in this movie. Everything that comes after that? My heart can’t be in that.”
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