One Nightstand With Justine Lupe

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

When it comes to creating viral television, Justine Lupe might just be the secret sauce. From 2018 to 2023 she appeared as Willa on Succession, the former escort who married actual-eldest-boy, Connor. “I feel like I was in this kind of niche sweet little pocket of being very involved with the show and very close to the show, and also not in the crazy storm of the show,” she says of the show’s ongoing virality. “I was one step removed from it in terms of I didn’t feel like a lot of crazy energy around me personally, but it’s an exciting thing to know that people are excited and that they’re interested.”

Since 2024 she’s been a fixture in Netflix’s superhit Nobody Wants This, where she plays Morgan, sister of Kristen Bell’s Joanna. “They’ve just locked the 10 episodes,” she says of Season 2, which drops on October 23. “It’s funny because in my mind it feels like forever, but whenever I talk to people about it, they’re like, ‘What a quick turnaround.’ It shoots very quickly. It’s truly a two-and-a-half month shoot, if that.”

The show’s ostensible focus is Joanna’s burgeoning romantic relationship with Rabbi Noah, played by Adam Brody — whose real-life wife, Leighton Meester, will join the cast for Season 2. (“She’s a delight and so much more of a goof than I would imagine before I knew her,” says Lupe of her new castmate.) But for viewers who grew up with sisters, there’s something about Morgan and Joanna’s relationship that feels like the real draw.

“They kind of weirdly have a competition in their rapport, in the bites that they take at each other, but it’s kind of their love language at the same time,” says Lupe. “There are some Shakespearean characters where the whole thing is about the wit and the game.” She pauses. “I don’t want to say, ‘This is a modern-day Shakespeare’ by any means,” she says, laughing, “but I do feel like there’s something about the game of the fight that it never goes too serious.”

The themes of love, competition, and sibling strife recur in many of the books which Lupe has selected as her five favorites. She recently finished her first pick, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, after putting it off for years. “I had a boyfriend in my twenties who had ‘timshel’ tattooed onto him, and he was a really crummy boyfriend, so I kind of had an aversion to the book,” she says. “And then I read the book and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m considering getting tattooed on as well.’ It's just so full of all these little lessons that you truly want to carry with you as a person.”

Her second selection, Small Things like These by Claire Keegan, is more slender, though no less impactful. “It felt like she just refined the story down to just what was needed, that there was no superfluous anything,” says Lupe. “It’s just such a quiet, direct accounting of an encounter that happens. It hit me so hard.” She continues: “The ending is terrible, because it’s beautiful in that he does the right thing, and also you are left with not knowing what the repercussions of that will be.”

Lupe was initially turned off by the hype around her third selection, Elena Ferrante’s modern classic My Brilliant Friend. “It’s another one where I held off on reading it,” she says. She finally dove in during the pandemic and flew through it. “I was just so attracted to this friendship dynamic and the way that it ebbs and flows through a long life,” she says. “I had a fun time observing my brain observing, watching how I felt about each of them, how I felt about their dynamic, if I felt like it was toxic, if I felt like it was this soul connection.”

The plot of her fourth selection, Stoner by John Edward Williams, surprised her. “I thought it was going to be a very different thing,” she says, laughing, of the book’s title. “It’s this very quiet book and not too much happens, but so much happens and you get to witness all of the kind of tragedies of his life and the wins,” she adds. “They’re very quiet wins, but they’re impactful and you kind of just get to bear witness to this life that most of us lead. It feels at once very small and in moments, I think, sad, and at other times it’s just like it’s everything.”

She fell in love with her final choice, A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, back in high school. “It’s kind of the first book I remember reading past Harry Potter. I had this incredible teacher — her name was Ms. Sparks, she was great — and in retrospect, she just taught this book so well. She was not shy about it in any way. There’s a lot in this book… there’s incest, there’s a lot of sex, there’s a lot of toxic masculinity, and she was so brave about teaching it. There was no stigma against it. There was nothing taboo.

“I just remember being so into it. I just had so much fun with it,” she adds. “It’s so colorful, it’s so imaginative. It’s so far out. It is a trippy book. I feel like he’s got some kind of access to different dimensions or something.”

Watch the full video below.