‘Nobody Wants This’ turns a complicated triangle into a ‘situation’ in Season 3

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”

The “what are we?” talk can be terrifying. But it’s considerably less stressful watching Justine Lupe, Timothy Simons and Jackie Tohn, who depict the controversial and complicated relationship that runs parallel to the couple at the heart of “Nobody Wants This,” huddled on a couch in a mauve-drenched greenroom inside Netflix’s Hollywood office, trying to define the status of their characters.

“It’s definitely a messy love triangle,” Tohn declares. “Depending on which of us you ask, it is or isn’t a situationship.”

Simons interjects: “I think ‘situationship’ isn’t right. I would describe it as a situation rather than a messy love triangle — only because one interesting thing about the show is that these people are not 23.”

“If this had happened in Season 1 or Season 2,” Lupe adds, “this would be a messy love triangle, and it would be toxic. The fact that it happened after decisions were made and relationship contracts were established, it becomes more of a situation because no one’s transgressing, no one’s doing anything that they actually shouldn’t be doing. It just is complicated.”

The development Lupe is referencing is one viewers had long suspected would happen.

While “Nobody Wants This” centers on the romance between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the supporting trio‘s dynamic delivers the sort of side-eye that could fuel a viral TikTok “storytime” series. From the moment they met, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Simons) shared a boundary-pushing friendship that added strain to his 15-year marriage to wife Esther (Tohn). After Esther’s soul-searching decision to separate, the third season of the show, now streaming, tracks the fallout of their life apart.

Esther reenters the dating scene, doing her best to navigate its modern complexities without losing her mind. Meanwhile, Sasha moves out, temporarily — and platonically — shacking up with Morgan (and her parents). But when he accompanies Morgan to New York City for a work opportunity, their tension reaches a tipping point — and they sleep together. Emotional chaos ensues.

Tohn, Simons and Lupe gathered to reflect on the so-called situation their characters are navigating.

Did you suspect Sasha and Morgan would eventually hook up or did you think they could stay that rare depiction of a platonic friendship?

Lupe: I felt a mixed bag. I felt like there was always chemistry [between Sasha and Morgan]. And when she [Esther] was like, “I’m leaving and I’m doing something else” — because I think it would have been really ugly if Sasha had made the decision — I thought there was potential.

Tohn: Esther said: I want to figure this out and you should too. There really are no transgressions. You can’t be mad at Esther because she’s this woman of a certain age making these decisions and speaking for her emotional self for maybe the first time in her life; and Sasha being so respectful of her in every single way. Morgan too. Morgan being respectful of their relationship this whole time, even though Esther didn’t like it, it really never crossed a line.

That doesn’t make it any less emotionally icky or tricky.

Tohn: It’s sticky.

Lupe: It still carries a lot of emotional weight. If I was Esther, I would like feel like I got my gut punched. And I, as Morgan, understand rationally that’s his ex-wife, and it makes sense that they [Sasha and Morgan] hooked up, but the fact that he did that after everything we’ve [Sasha and Esther] been through is also a gut punch.

Simons: The other thing underneath is we’re on a fun, light romantic comedy. So I also did question whether or not it would happen.

What’s interesting about the show is we’re following the beginning stages of a couple, while Esther and Sasha offer a glimpse of a long-term couple at a crossroads and figuring out: Am I happy? Am I not happy? Is this fixable? And that can feel so much more relatable to people at this stage in life.

Tohn: What has been fun is that Esther is famously this character who has a stick up her a—, and in Season 3, you see maybe who she was when she was younger. You see her being out there and being giggly and being maybe how she was when she and Sasha were first together. It’s also really fascinating because … Esther finds someone new, but when she learns about them, playing those feelings about her intuition is fascinating. It’s like, “I f—ing said from jump that you two were shady!” And it’s like, “Well, we weren’t. You let me go. You literally forced my hand. Now I played that hand, and you’re mad at me.”

Simons: I think a pretty common refrain among people that have been in long-term relationships is that no relationship is ever the same as it was when you first met. You become different people. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, where there is a separation because the people that we turned into are now no longer compatible. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, but it’s just that this is not the way that we want to spend the rest of our lives.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Esther returns to the dating scene and finds a match in Julian, played by Steven Weber. And it’s an adjustment for her.

Tohn: I love Steven so much. I love the way they handle things like that on this show. She says to Sasha, “Go sow your oats. I am.” Then when he does, she’s heartbroken. She still loves her husband and is not ready for that to be done, and is dating this new person who is seeing other people, and that’s also devastating to her. None of it really makes sense, but none of us really makes sense. I loved getting to play all of that because the stuff with Steven was so light and fun and cute and flirty, because we’re dating and we’re in that honeymoon phase. Tim and I never got to play that because they’re the polar opposite of the honeymoon phase.

I imagine the writers gave you a heads-up of where things were going for this trio. Did you have thoughts about what you didn’t want it to be or something you didn’t want to see your character do?

Lupe: There was a different storyline between Morgan and Sasha that we kind of talked them out of.

Simons: There was, at one point, a version of this very early on that was: I go to New York with Morgan, and it’s actually that we hooked up before the show [Morgan is a guest on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen”], and then on the show she says something about —

Lupe: She tells Andy, “I’m single and available. Set me up.”

Simons: But they had had the same deep, meaningful time together and her saying that hits him. And the idea was that Sasha was going to run away. He was going to leave early. I remember mentioning it to the writers that it felt immature for him to do that, it felt a little bit out of character —

Lupe: From there, we were like, I think Morgan should carry the flame. Morgan is changed. I proposed it to Erin [Foster, the show’s creator and executive producer] and she was very receptive. Then there was another version of it where Morgan was like, “OK, well, I didn’t mean it anyway,” and walks it back. And we were like, “Hasn’t Morgan actually changed through this?”

Simons: Given their two histories, it does make sense that this would be scarier to her, and that she would run away. It’s more interesting that it comes for her, and it’s also interesting that Sasha is like, “I actually don’t think this is the right time for us.” That is not something that I would have expected from him previously.

Julian (Steven Weber) becomes Esther’s (Tohn) new paramour after she splits with Sasha.

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Did you enjoy getting to be the rom-com leads for a moment? To have that mini-movie in New York?

Lupe: I grew up living for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Those movies are my comfort food, and those women were my idols as a kid. I’ve never really played the conventional rom-com lead ever. It was so fun. I loved it so much. There was also the concern of how will we look kissing because we’re both very tall.

Simons: There’s a lot of limbs.

Lupe: We’re like Muppet people. I was like, I really hope that people like are rooting for wanting us to kiss instead of being like, “What is that?”

Simons: We get to the moment and are like, “Oh God, there’s so much arms.”

Lupe: And we said that to the writers. We’re like, “We need meticulous feedback about how this is looking.” When we finally do kiss, the crew are all camped out on this floor of a hotel, and everybody is in the different rooms with a monitor, and we finally kissed, there was like a massive cheer. And I don’t even think they were rooting for Morgan and Sasha, they were rooting for Tim and Justine to look mildly hot.

Simons: This was very much a challenge for me because this is not a world that I’ve really played in, even in my regular life. I don’t consider myself to be a very debonair or romantic person. So it was a fun thing to like find how can this be romantic while still not all of a sudden trying to do the thing where you’re like [mimics a suave expression].

Lupe: There was a point where Tim had a hard time where he had to say “Hey.”

The “Hey” delivery is such a fine art. I always revert back to “Felicity.”

Lupe: As we were doing it, I was like, “Tim is dying.”

Simons: I was dying.

Lupe: We were talking about you did it in real life. You actually said that, you did say “hey” in a moment like that.

Simons: But I was much younger.

Lupe: So maybe he was projecting his own cringe.

The season ends with Esther, Sasha and Morgan all unhappy. What do you hope to see in a potential fourth season?

Tohn: Just how it plays out. The season did not end with someone being chosen, or one of them giving an ultimatum or anything. It really is up in the air, and so much more has to happen with Sasha and Esther, and clearly, now, so much more has to happen with Morgan and Sasha to figure out what’s happening.

Lupe: Tim’s gonna be a busy boy next season. A lot of chitchats.

Simons: A lot of state of the unions. I think there is something cool about that and mature about it, Morgan and Sasha not getting that rom-com ending — not only from the fact that like I would love it if the show kept going, but there’s a maturity to that. It doesn’t fully close that door, but it’s also just not, “Hey, everything’s going to be perfect now.”