Wesley Cardino Talks Cinematography on Netflix’s ‘Nobody Wants This’

Nobody Wants This is a sunny Los Angeles romance. The Erin Foster-created series is often light on its feet, which is no easy feat to pull off. While the comedy can go broad, that lightness still requires a serious touch. That’s a part of the approach cinematographer Wesley Cardino takes.

Cardino, who also worked on Best Medicine and in The Walking Dead universe, shot every episode of season two of the hit Netflix series. That’s a rarity for a cinematographer, to create the beginning, middle, and end of a season. It creates consistency.

Cardino wants the cinematography not only to evoke romance, but the pressing questions Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody) face about conversion and identity. Recently, the cinematographer spoke with What’s On Netflix about capturing those characters in the right LA light.

The showrunners had a pretty good idea of songs they wanted in the series. Say for certain sequences, do you ever know what song they have in mind and does it influence how you light and pace a scene?

Unfortunately, no. I know Erin Foster is very sort of plugged in to a lot of stuff and things can change based on what she thinks would be a great fit. I wish I could say it did play a part, but it hasn’t played a part, I think, for Nobody Wants This.

A lot of the show really, the scripts are there, and it’s not like they’re finding the show in the edit, but I think they’re refining the pacing in the edit. It’s not a super improv show, but I think the pace is more sort of discovered in the edit and less on set. Not to say that we don’t think about that. We want it to feel quick and witty and fun. That’s something that we’re always conscious of when we’re shooting and how we’re covering scenes and stuff like that.

How do you leave room for spontaneity on set then?

Oftentimes we’ll let the cameras roll for a little bit longer after the scene officially ends, just to see if a little nugget of gold sort of develops or a button on a scene from one of the characters. They’re all so funny and they’re so sharp and quick to come up with things. I like to give the actors some freedom to move around. I think that’s important for just the vibe. 

We have marks and everything, but it’s a balance. I’m looking to make sure that everybody’s still looking very good, that they do have some very defined light for when they do hit certain moments. I think that that’s kind of the underpinning of the show. It’s important to us to have it feel rich, inviting, warm, fun, not too glossy. We don’t want it to feel super glossy, but we want it to look nice. It’s a fun romcom, so that’s an important sort of guiding force for us.

How do you avoid glossy and keep the show warm and inviting to watch?

It’s about not letting things be too perfect. Sometimes I let some of the imperfections of lenses play out, whether that’s chromatic aberration or a bright spot in the frame creating halos or slight double images, stuff like that. I try to let some of that sneak through.

I make sure that they’re not always in perfect light. It’s making sure that there’s still that sort of grounded naturalism in it. And then when I go to the grade, I try to give a richness and density to the image so it doesn’t feel overly bright or overexposed. Sometimes rom-coms can go in that direction and feel very plasticky.

If we’re at a location, for instance, in episode 10 at the end at LACMA with the street lamps, I embrace the natural lighting of the area. We did that in that scene. We really only set up one light to give them a little bit of modeling, and all of the rest of that glow around there just came from the practical lighting of the location.

For the finale, it’s great to see the Academy Museum as the setting for all that drama that unfolds in a beautiful setting.

I’d never shot anything there, and it’s gone through so much development over the last decade. I kind of called it the Death Star with that big event space up there. The production designer, Claire Bennett, did such an amazing job dressing it and designing it. Iwas a pleasure to light. It was so graphic and rich. Once you got up there, it presented itself as what we needed to do.

How so? Because you needed to do a lot for that ending.

Exactly. You get to look out over the city and everything as the whole story as Morgan (Justine Lupe) and Dr. Andy’s (Arian Moayed) relationship falls apart. It’s also a bittersweet ending for Sasha (Timothy Simmons) and Esther (Jackie Tohn). When Esther and Sasha break up on the dance floor, that was planned to play out at that time of day so that we could capture that fading light of Los Angeles — the warmth, the glow of sunset in LA.

We shot that with two cameras and wanted to capture the essence of that moment, the beauty of the light, and let the actors play it so that they could get into the emotion of it all. It was really important to let them play through the emotions those two characters were going through at that moment.

We didn’t want bright lights smashing into their faces while trying to do this sad ending to their relationship. In season three, though, we’ll see what happens.

Most cinematographers you speak to really want, especially with romantic comedies, for light to do their actors justice. To make them look the best they can. How do you do that right?

It’s always a little bit nerve-wracking because you just want them to look good. You don’t want it to look fake, but you want them to look the best they can. And with Kristen Bell, in pre-production, we tested different lighting approaches to find what we felt would be the best way to do it.

The other thing, too, is all of the people on the show are genuinely easy to light as well, so that makes my job a lot easier. They’re all very handsome, but it’s just about testing placement of the light and making sure they’ve got that glow.

I mean, that’s always something that I’m very attuned to when I look at a frame, especially a close-up. Okay, where’s the light placed? Does it feel natural? Sometimes we’ll use backlight, sometimes we won’t, depending on whether the motivation feels right. More often than not, I’ll sneak in a little edge light to give it that glow, making sure it’s subtle so it doesn’t feel artificial.

The eyelight, the edge, and the placement and softness of the light along with texture — that’s my approach to making them look good.

Nobody Wants This. Kristen Bell as Joanne in episode 209 of Nobody Wants This. Cr. Erin Simkin/Netflix © 2025

For a more romantic scene, what do you want light to accomplish?

I’ll use a little diffusion on the camera to give the whole image a subtle glow, just enough to elevate it. We don’t do a lot of night scenes in the show, but it gives a bit of extra oomph. Even during day scenes, it helps the backgrounds bloom slightly. The out-of-focus highlights don’t go over the top.

Why aren’t there many night scenes on the show?

Partially because we want the story to feel light. Not that there isn’t heavy material, but we want that lightness to shine through. It’s also about showing off Los Angeles. When we’re on location, we want to see it. Overall, the show just feels like a daytime show rather than a heavy nighttime one.

We choose night scenes based on the logic of the script, often romantic or bittersweet moments, like when Sasha and Morgan are at the ice cream stand and connecting. It naturally presented itself as a good night scene, as did the finale.

On the other side of that contrast is the bar scene, which is a day scene.

When Sasha starts an argument, right?

Yeah. It’s a bit counterintuitive — people going out to have fun at a bar, but instead they’re playing a card game. I like that it’s daytime because everything is out in the open. There’s no darkness, no secrets. They have to admit things they didn’t know about each other or didn’t share.

As rare as you shoot nighttime in Los Angeles, do you ever wish for Nobody Wants This that there were visible stars you could actually shoot for romance?

That’s always something I think about for night scenes. The stars are romantic, and it would be nice to see them in the city. But practically speaking, I don’t mind the light pollution in LA. It creates separation between the sky and the darker areas in a way you wouldn’t normally get.

There are shots at night where you think there might be mountains back there, but the light pollution is so intense. We’ve never really talked about sky replacement. It’s something you could do, but it wouldn’t feel real. We want the show to feel authentic.