After three seasons of friendship, flirting, and gradually shifting feelings, Timothy Simons’ Sasha and Justine Lupe’s Morgan finally get their big romantic moment in Episode 7 of Season 3 of Nobody Wants This.
The episode follows Morgan and Sasha as they head to New York for Morgan’s appearance on Watch What Happens Live. What begins as a trip to support Morgan turns into an unforgettable night in the city, complete with romantic moments, plenty of anticipation, and, ultimately, a long-awaited kiss.
At Netflix’s Nobody Wants This FYC event in Los Angeles, Simons and Lupe reflected on bringing the pivotal moment to life, revealing that while they were excited to explore a more romantic side of their characters, they also felt the pressure of getting it right.
For Simons, who plays the brother of Adam Brody’s Noah, the opportunity to have an entire episode centered on Sasha and Morgan was both exciting and a little daunting.
“There are 10 episodes of this show, and they were basically saying we’re going to spend an entire one of them on you. We approached it like, ‘Let’s not f–k this up!’” Simons said.
The actors knew the romantic storyline was coming and spent time thinking through the small moments that would ultimately lead to the kiss. Simons says filming together in New York’s SoHo neighborhood was particularly memorable.
“We just tried to stay focused on all the little steps that would lead up to that,” he said.
Beyond getting to explore the streets of New York together, Simons says the storyline offered both actors an opportunity to step into a genre and dynamic they hadn’t necessarily explored before.
“It was like a lane that I don’t think either of us had ever really played in before, and it felt like we got to be two sort of oddballs doing a romantic comedy,” he said.
Lupe, who plays the sister of Kristen Bell’s character, Joanne, described Simons as a “dear friend” and said she was just as enthusiastic about the experience, calling the episode a dream to film. But bringing the romantic chemistry to the screen required more preparation than viewers might expect.
“We’re giving each other a lot of pep talks about, like, how to make ourselves not look like just a mess of bones clashing into each other during the kiss. I think, truly, we had so many talks,” she said.
Their concerns were partly practical. Both actors are tall, and translating that into an intimate on-screen moment meant accounting for plenty of moving limbs and the possibility of an awkward collision.
“So much of us is limb, and there are so many elbows,” Simons joked. “Like weeks early, you’d be like, ‘Hey, maybe we should just block this out real quick.’”
Still, the preparation went beyond simply figuring out the physical choreography. The actors understood that the kiss represented a significant turning point for Sasha and Morgan, making it essential that the moment felt earned after all the buildup.
“If that moment doesn’t work, then everything that leads up to it doesn’t work. So I think we were feeling a little bit of that pressure,” Simons said.
For Simons, playing Sasha has remained rewarding throughout the show’s run. Ahead of a screening and Q&A, the actor spoke with Gold Derby about what continues to make the character enjoyable after three seasons.
“There is something fun about the fact that Sasha hasn’t changed, even though he has matured. He’s still a little bit of a goof, but there is an honesty and sweetness to him that I think is really fun to play,” he said.
Lupe noted that the best part of getting to play Morgan on the series — which just announced its renewal for a fourth season — is that her character continues to reveal new layers as the story progresses.
“I feel like there’s a constant unraveling and a constant rediscovering of who she is,” she tells Gold Derby. “Especially after this last season, I felt like we got to know her in a different way.”
