Weeks before Nobody Wants This returns for a third season, its rabbi-playing lead broke his public silence on Gaza in a new GQ interview.
Adam Brody has gone public with a position he says he's held privately for a while. In a new interview with GQ, the Nobody Wants This star was blunt when the subject turned to Israel and Gaza: "Put me down as thinking it's a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine."
The timing matters. Brody plays Rabbi Noah Roklov opposite Kristen Bell's Joanne Williams in the Netflix rom-com, which returns for Season 3 on October 22. He's been nominated for an Emmy for the role and picked up a Critics Choice Award last year. Playing a rabbi on a show built around Jewish identity and traditions, and then wading into the most contentious subject connected to that identity right before the season drops, is not a small thing.
Brody was candid about why he'd stayed quiet till now. Asked how the war has come up in his public messaging, he said, "Truthfully, it hasn't. I have spoken a lot about it privately. I haven't spoken much about it publicly." That changed in this interview.
He framed the moment as part of a bigger shift in Hollywood, one he finds discouraging. "Between COVID, a second Trump term, Israel-Gaza, it's really brought out some different beliefs that I was ignorant to, and then disheartened by," he told GQ, responding to a question about whether the industry has swung conservative. He added that he hopes a future administration can walk back policies he blames for prolonging the suffering. "It's awful that it's taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it's reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago," he said.
Deadline reported that Brody's comments land days after roughly a hundred people, including several of his industry peers, were arrested outside the UN General Assembly in New York while protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit on Thursday. Whether Brody was among the wider push to speak up or acting on his own timeline isn't clear from the interview.
His stance also sits at odds with how the show itself has handled the subject. Series creator Erin Foster told The Hollywood Reporter last year that Nobody Wants This was never built to tackle the conflict head-on. "This is not the show to tackle conflict in Israel and Palestine," she said, adding that after October 7, there were internal conversations about addressing it but the decision was to keep telling "positive Jewish stories" instead.
That gap between what Brody says off-screen and what his show does on-screen is likely to follow the season into its release. Whether Netflix or Foster respond to Brody's comments before October 22 is the next thing to watch.
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