Younger's Nico Tortorella Breaks Down That 'Raw, Emotional' Josh/Liza Twist
After weeks of flirting with disaster, Josh and Liza finally reached a turning point in their relationship on Wednesday’s Younger.
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At Liza’s request, the tattoo whisperer agreed to leave her out of his T Magazine interview for fear that fact checkers would uncover her real age — but when a blissfully ignorant, not to mention slightly belligerent, Kelsey tore into him for failing to mention his girlfriend in the piece, he just couldn’t take it anymore.
“He’s gaining celebrity in his life, and he wants to be able to share it with [Liza], but he just can’t,” Nico Tortorella tells TVLine. “That’s a big deal-breaker for him.”
But don’t assume that the inevitability of Josh and Liza’s split made the break-up scene any easier for the actors to film.
“We knew something was bound to happen after these past few episodes, but the way the scene read on paper was so much different than us doing it in person,” Tortorella says. “Sutton [Foster] and I are both raw, emotional people, and when we have to do any type of darker scene, we fully commit to it. When we got to work that day, we couldn’t even look at each other without one of us getting emotional. Everything happening in that scene was how we were actually feeling.”
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Below, Tortorella takes us inside Josh’s brain and previews what’s to come for the newly single Brooklynite.
TVLINE | What’s Josh’s next step?
He’s focusing on himself right now. He’s got a lot going on at the tattoo shop, and with the Times, and he just has to get back to the basics. He’s ready to start working on himself.
TVLINE | I’m sure Gabe will be thrilled to have Liza gone.
[Laughs] I don’t know, she really helped him out with that calamine lotion in the last episode. … No, I think he’ll be excited to go out and party with Josh again.
TVLINE | He’ll need to go buy some new bathrobes.
I’m sure he’ll find one somewhere.
TVLINE | Josh is only friends with Kelsey and the others because he’s dating Liza. Without her, is he still going to maintain those relationships?
We saw that a little bit when they broke up in the first season; Kelsey and Lauren came to the bar and he was like, “What are you guys doing here?” I think he’d be open to having a relationship with them if it didn’t have anything to do with her. Josh is probably pretty quick to forgive and forget and move on. He’ll find something in his life to make him happy to turn him back into the Josh that everybody loves.
TVLINE | Since you brought up the last breakup, how is this one different?
Well, we’re older now, no pun intended. We’re more grown up in this relationship. We know how to deal with heartbreak better, and we know what we want out of a relationship. Josh just made up his mind that this wasn’t working, so he removed it from his life to live as authentically as he could.
TVLINE | This is kind of unrelated, but I just realized I still have Younger‘s all-Josh calendar sitting on my desk. How did that come about?
[Laughs] The whole thing started out as a joke. TV Land was doing our promo shoot for the second season, and they were like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we did a Josh calendar?” I was like, “That’s not funny. Let’s actually do it.” … The original plan was just to do different faces each month, but I was like, “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it the right way.” I got my buddy hired to shoot it, and I pretty much art-directed the whole thing. I sat on art-direction phone calls for hours, getting everything set in stone. … My favorite month is probably April, because I have the most clothes on.
TVLINE | That seems to be a running theme on Younger. How do you feel about the objectification of Josh?
Oh, I’m all for it; there’s a time and a place to be objectified. It’s one thing if there’s a character that’s just serving body all of the time, but he doesn’t have the talent to back it up. That’s not necessarily the situation here. We’re able to have these dramatic scenes, like we do this week, but also balance it with everything else.
Younger fans, are you ready to mourn Josh and Liza’s relationship and move on? Drop a comment with your thoughts below.
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