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How TV’s Most Loathsome Actor Became an Unlikely Heartthrob

“This is uncharted territory for me,” Timothy Simons told “Obsessed: The Podcast.”

For years, Timothy Simons’ romantic on-screen advances made Veep audiences gag. Now, in Netflix‘s Nobody Wants This, his portrayal of romantic lead Sasha Roklov makes Obsessed’s Kevin Fallon—a self-described “cold-hearted cynic”—cry.

“If I have ever been asked to kiss someone in something leading up to this, the desired response was, ‘That’s funny,’ or ‘Oh, that’s gross,’” Simons told Fallon on Obsessed: The Podcast. “So this is uncharted territory for me.”

Nobody Wants This follows podcaster Joanne Williams (Kristen Bell), who is navigating a relationship with handsome rabbi Noah Roklov (Adam Brody). But another romantic subplot bumps against, complements, and sometimes eclipses Joanne and Noah’s, especially in Season 3, which premiered Oct. 22: the slow-burn, complicated relationship between Noah’s married brother, Sasha, and Joanne’s egocentric sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe).

Sasha is a new role for Simons, a stark departure from his breakout character Jonah Ryan, a ridiculous, soulless White House staffer in the political satire Veep. TIME described him as “a character who would never be attractive to anyone.” His Veep co-stars called him “the 60-foot virgin,” “Jolly Green Jizzface,” and “scrotum pole,” among other colorful insults.

After seven years playing “whale pube” Jonah, Simons knew classic romantic comedy tropes would feel alien to him—and to Sasha, who had separated from his wife, Esther, at the end of Season 2. Simons is glad that Nobody Wants This writers avoided contorting Sasha and Morgan into more suave versions of themselves. Instead, they keep their bumbling awkwardness when they finally kiss, forgoing Hollywood polish in favor of unglossy candor.

“I do like that ultimately that they wrote it in such a way that wasn’t like, all of a sudden, we had to start being different people,” he said. “And I think it was one of the things that made me sort of comfortable with it. If I had to do some sort of classically classic romantic comedy thing, I probably would have looked very stiff and uncomfortable.”

“But because it was, ‘OK, well, what is the weirdo version of a romantic comedy that these two people would do,’ it felt more natural,” he continued. “I was much less scared of it because of that, because it was like, ‘Oh, this is like a little bit of a funhouse mirror romantic lead thing.”

Despite his character’s self-conscious sweetness, Simons said his “DM’s have not been blowing up.” He thinks audiences “understand” the sharp differences between himself and his character; he added that he and Lupe are “both very limb-forward,” so they were worried about gawkiness during their kiss. He thinks audiences see through Sasha’s on-screen sexiness to his off-screen gangliness.

“We were so worried about looking like Muppets, with the little arms on the little sticks,” he said. “Nobody’s in the DM’s because, ultimately, they understand the Muppet thing, too.”

Season 3 of Nobody Wants This is streaming on Netflix.

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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