Justine Lupe on ‘Nobody Wants This’ and ‘Succession’

I
t’s late August, and Justine Lupe is driving in her black SUV through the winding streets of Woodstock, New York, nibbling on a chocolate chip cookie. Lily, her miniature 13-year-old rescue dog, is in her lap; in the backseat is her one-year-old daughter, Ellis. We just got in the car following a hike, and we’ve only been driving for about a minute before the rented Audi Q5 begins to beep ominously. “It’s saying the vehicle’s key is not detected,” Lupe says. “I’m hoping I didn’t put it on the car and drive [away].” She gasps, realizing that’s exactly what happened, and pulls over. “This is a learning moment,” says Lupe, 36. “This is Morgan.”

Morgan is Lupe’s character on the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This, which returns for a second season on Oct. 23. The show follows Kristen Bell’s sex podcaster Joanne and Adam Brody’s rabbi Noah, an unlikely pair who fall in love. Morgan, Joanne’s deadpan, uber-confident sister who is mostly critical of Joanne’s new relationship, and is responsible for many of the show’s funniest moments. Self-absorbed and outspoken, she’s a wildly different character from Lupe’s breakout role as the high-end sex worker Willa Ferreyra on Succession, or Astrid Weissman, the perky convert sister-in-law on The Marvelous Ms. Maisel. And it’s her biggest part yet. 

“Justine is special,” says her Succession co-star, Alan Ruck. “She’s got kind of an old-fashioned thing. Beautiful, funny — wacky funny, like Lucille Ball. It’s evident when she walks in the room that she’s a force to be reckoned with.” 

LUPE MEETS ME that afternoon at the Overlook Bakery wearing jeans, a charcoal-gray T-shirt, and a cauliflower-blue baseball cap from the Eddy, a corner store in Santa Barbara. With her makeup-free glow and black clogs, Ellis on her hip and Lily following along on a leash, Lupe looks like the Earth mother of Woodstock. She teases me about ordering a hot drink in the steamy summer weather: “That’s very Ayurvedic of you!”

Lupe, a Denver native, and her husband, visual artist Tyson Mason, are based in L.A., but they’ve spent the summer in upstate New York, surrounded by the serene greenery, creeks, and mountains. They wound up loving the Catskills so much that they nearly bought a house here, but backed out during the inspection process. (She cites the East Coast winters, filming Nobody Wants This in L.A., and recent hellish experiences driving to the nearest airport as reasons.) After driving to her hiking spot, Lupe retrieves Ellis and Lily from the car, and we walk for a few minutes before she spots a trail to take. “It’s going to be so sick if we get lost out here for, like, five hours,” she jokes. 

As we leisurely stroll the mile-long loop, briefly stopping to sit by a gorgeous creek, Lupe chats about her love of cooking and her most “bougie indulgence” (a spa in L.A.). She says she only drinks on occasion, mostly because it makes her sleepy. “Can you imagine?” she says. “I’m already on a different planet.” 

“Chill” is the word Bell uses to describe Lupe over the phone a few weeks later. “She’s so effervescent and watchable no matter what type of character she’s playing.”

The two hadn’t met before Lupe was cast on Nobody Wants This, which is loosely based on creator Erin Foster’s interfaith marriage and the podcast she hosts with her sister, Sarah (The World’s First Podcast). The onscreen sisters began taking hikes and getting to know each other. “It was a very immediate connection,” Bell says, adding, “I’ve never met anyone who’s like, ‘I don’t like Justine.’ Like, I would think that person’s a lunatic.”

Veep alum Timothy Simons, who plays Sasha — Noah’s goofy “loser sibling” who, though married, has a will-they-won’t-they relationship with Morgan — agrees. “She just has a very grounded worldview,” he says. “And all of those flowery things aside, she’s also a good fucking hang. But I will say when you’re on set with Justine post 8 p.m., there is a structural collapse. It’s like dealing with the funniest drunk toddler.” 

Lupe and Simons have become close friends, to the point where they try to sit next to each other on flights for press trips. “I remember at one point I emailed the agency to coordinate,” he says. “I told my wife, ‘If they didn’t know that we were so close, this truly just looks like two people who are having an affair.” 

On one of those trips, to New York City last May, they hung out at the swanky Pebble Bar, which is co-owned by Arian Moayed, who played Stewy on Succession and appears in the new season of Nobody Wants This. Lupe watched her two worlds collide as Simons, Brody, and Jackie Tohn, who plays Sasha’s wife Esther on the series, got to meet Succession actors like Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook. “It was very cool for me as a giant fan to be sitting on a big L-shaped couch with a bunch of people from that show,” Simons says. “But Justine being the bridge between everybody made it more fun.”

Lupe wasn’t supposed to have a lasting role as Succession’s Willa, the paid girlfriend of Ruck’s Connor Roy, whom he eventually marries. But, says series creator Jesse Armstrong, “she’s so brilliant that you just want to write more and more for her.” Willa became a fan favorite — the aspiring playwright who offers an outside perspective of the obscenely wealthy and manipulative Roy family. “It has a murderers’ row of people, and she still managed to stick out,” notes Simons. 

LOSING CAR KEYS ASIDE, Lupe says Morgan is “a little more bitchy” than she is (considering Lupe insisted on buying my coffee and cookie, I believe this). But Simons points out one similarity. “At the Emmys, she shows up obviously looking like one million dollars, and does an interview about whether or not they were going to have to tape her butt cheeks together,” he says. “Those are the things that exist in Morgan that also exist in Justine. There is a chaos agent that overlaps a little bit.”

Though Lupe doesn’t have any sisters (her sole sibling is a younger brother), for Nobody Wants This she was able to pull experiences from her relationship with her best friend, who she met while attending Juilliard. She also listened to Sarah on The World’s First Podcast, so she could better tap into the semi-autobiographical story. “There’s an emotional heat that comes with two women fighting,” she says. “A really close, unconditional love. I know that feeling. Funnily enough, Erin and Sarah don’t fight like that on their podcast, but they do bicker, and I think they have fun with it.’”
 
Lupe and Bell see the new season of Nobody Wants This as a love story between the two sisters. And without spoiling anything, Morgan gets to do a lot more this time around. “I was kind of stunned,” Lupe says. “I don’t take it for granted that they are putting so much dimension into Morgan, and trust in me that I could do it.”

She experienced challenges while shooting the new season, which was filmed from March to May of this year. While Lupe was pregnant during the first season, she was seven months postpartum as Season Two kicked off, and had recently stopped breastfeeding. She began having anxiety attacks and had trouble learning her lines, which she’d never experienced before. “Nobody told me that weaning hormones are aggressive,” she says. 

She was able to confide in Bell, who has two children of her own. “No one’s going to be able to do their best work, or even any work, if they feel completely out to sea while they’re on set,” Bell says. “As a mom, I know that feeling very well — those surging and dropping hormones. You don’t just have a baby and then instantly become who you were previously. There’s a whole process your body has to go through. I’m just glad she’s honest enough to share intimate things. She allows you to feel so close to her, because she’s a very authentic person.”

Lupe also attributed some of her anxiety to her expanded role. “I’ve been doing this since I graduated [Juilliard],” she says. “For, like, 16 years. And I’ve consistently been working in a way that’s very fulfilling. But I have always played these characters that pop in and out. They’re the fly on the wall in a lot of cases. But I’ve never had this level of responsibility, and I feel how once-in-a-lifetime that is as an actor. So there was just a part of me where I was like, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to fuck this up, because so many people don’t even get the chance to have a character like this.’”

We complete the hike without getting lost — “We just followed our hearts, you know?” Lupe says — and head toward the parking lot. Lupe opens the car door and pauses. “I just realized I have baby food all over my shirt.”

LUPE AND I CHAT over the phone a week later, while she’s visiting her godparents in Delaware. Though she decided not to buy the house in Woodstock, she and her husband are still dreaming of living outside L.A. — possibly in Montana, or her home state of Colorado. “There’s a part of me that finds a default setting in places that are a little bit more quiet,” she says. “I go to a more relaxed internal feeling.”

Growing up in Denver, Lupe would ask her brother, a future director of photography, to shoot videos of her. “It was always something that I was drawn to, even before I understood what I was doing,” she says. She was also a huge Harry Potter nerd. “I made a board game with my friend,” she admits. “We basically learned all of the spells and then we’d go out into public and do flash-mob style, like, pretending we were witches casting spells on each other in coffee shops. It was embarrassing.”

Lupe spent her middle and high school years attending the Denver School of the Arts, pursuing a major in drama and minor in creative writing. Her grandmother, community activist Katherine W. Schomp, was known as the founding mother of the school, and has a theater there named after her. After Lupe graduated Juilliard in 2011, she landed minor roles in David Chase’s Not Fade Away and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha. “I don’t think I realized what a big deal it was at the time, to be involved in two of the best directors of all time’s films,” she says. “It’s just bonkers. It was quite a running start.”

Now, she’s finally feeling confident about where she is in life — not unlike Morgan. “It’s been this huge gift to be able to come into my mid-thirties, and I just had a baby and this new level of responsibility on all fronts of my life,” she says. “I’m feeling like I’m ready for it. At the same time, completely terrified and anxious. But knowing, deep down, that this is the time.”