Los Angeles is sweltering. It’s the first Monday of October, which is late for a heat wave even in a city that runs on sunshine. Morale has sagged, I’m told, and the most upbeat among us have pinned their hair up in surrender. Jackie Tohn is the exception.
The actress, a Long Islander in L.A., is on set for our October digital cover shoot. Between poses, with Harry Styles blaring overhead, she keeps dropping one-liners, and I’m scrambling to type them into my phone like a court stenographer. “What murder doc am I going to watch when I get home?” she quips, in a little black Dolce & Gabbana blazer dress. Her hair falls in its signature waves, her skin radiant, her lip a soft rose. She moves to the click of the shutter as hairstylist Matthew Collins aims a leaf blower her way. Outside, the city is wilting. Tohn is not.
Tohn, 46, best known as Esther on Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, has kept her sense of humor through a hard year. It started when her father found cancerous lumps under his arm. The diagnosis was male breast cancer, which is rare, and it meant Tohn had a 50-50 chance of inheriting the same risk. In 2025, testing confirmed she carries a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, which sharply raises her odds of getting the disease.
“I’ve gone through my entire life thinking, ‘We are not a cancer family,’” she says. Heart attack, stroke, diabetes and high blood pressure ran in the family. Cancer, as far as anyone knew, did not.
Tohn, who is Jewish, was hardly alone. About one in 40 people of Ashkenazi descent carries a BRCA mutation, compared with roughly one in 400 in the general population, and one study found family-history screening missed more than half of carriers.
When she first tested positive, Tohn thought of Angelina Jolie, who revealed in 2013 that she’d had a preventive double mastectomy after learning she carried the same mutation. To Tohn, removing healthy breasts sounded “very extreme.” Then came her own numbers, including a 65-percent chance of ovarian cancer. Extreme, it turned out, was relative.
So Tohn decided not to wait. “I couldn’t live in a brain where someone’s holding that other shoe out, and it’s ready to drop, and it has a bomb in it,” she says. “My brain doesn’t work like that.” Many carriers choose enhanced screening, which can catch a cancer early but can’t prevent it, and she calls that “absolutely an option and their prerogative.” It just wasn’t hers. In December, she had a double mastectomy. Both breasts, pathology found, held precancerous cells.
Since then, Tohn’s made a point of talking about it. In May, she partnered with the genetic testing company Myriad, whose site, learnmyrisk.com, explains how the test works. By Tohn’s count, people “in the thousands” have gotten tested because of her story. The ones who test positive, she says, tend to ask the same thing: Now what?
For Tohn, the answer started with Nina, a friend of a friend she’d met maybe once at a party, who’d had the same surgery and offered to meet. They’d barely sat down at Alfred Coffee in Studio City when Nina suggested they head out to her car. “Do you want to see them?” she asked. (Them being her new breasts.) “So you could feel better about what the after can look like.”
Moments later, on Ventura Boulevard, Tohn was holding her sweater up like a privacy curtain while Nina lifted her top to show off the results. “They look amazing,” Tohn says. Not exactly how most people get acquainted, but it made a tough process a lot easier.
Nina went on to become her BRCA guru, fielding every question Tohn could think of: one surgery or two, whether fat grafting would follow, and which to take on first—the ovaries or the breasts. Tohn ultimately went direct-to-implant, all in one operation. Not everyone is a candidate, she says, but it’s an option worth asking your doctor about.
Nina didn’t stop at answering questions. Instead of sending an Amazon link, she had a box delivered to Tohn’s door with everything she’d need: a button-up shirt and a zip-up hoodie with inside pockets for the surgical drains; a water bottle with a long straw, for when you can’t lift your arms; and dry shampoo and shower sponges, because the incisions can’t get wet. She even arranged for a recliner rental, since without arm strength, getting out of a chair is a project. Tohn’s favorite was a pillow that drapes over the shoulders to shield her chest, mostly from her dogs. “You put your phone in the front,” she jokes, “and you look like you’re part of SEAL Team Six.”
Once she’d healed, Tohn gave the box to a woman about to have the same surgery. “Let’s just keep passing this box around,” she told her. The woman did, handing it off to a friend, and now it has a name: the Sisterhood of the Traveling Boobs. “You never want anyone to have to go through it,” Tohn says. “But if you do, it’s really a sense of community and sisterly support that I don’t think I’ve ever felt in my life.”
Lately, the balance has tipped toward the good. After 30 years in the business of what Tohn calls “it not quite working out,” things are finally clicking, and with that comes more red carpets, more press, more time in hair and makeup. It’s the part of the job she’s always loved, and last year, it kept her from wallowing. “Getting dressed and getting glammed was a high point while I was really in the thick of all of this,” she says.
What’s changed is how she sees all of it. Until last year, she’d never had something happen “where it changes your entire perspective on the whole way you live.” “I’ve tried a million times to, like, not sweat the small stuff,” she says. “And then something like this happens and you’re like, ‘Oh, that literally doesn’t matter at all.’ I find that to be an impossible lesson to learn until you’re in it.”
What does matter, presumably, includes pain au chocolat and pasta. This summer, she and her boyfriend Joe Gillette went to France and Italy. The trip “woke the travel bug up” in them, she says. That restlessness has followed them home, where they’re gutting their house: “building walls and knocking stuff down and, you know, demoing the bathrooms, like really going for it.” It’s still chaos, but this time, it’s by choice.
And then, of course, there’s the show. Season three of Nobody Wants This, which stars her real-life bestie Kristen Bell and Adam Brody as an unlikely couple, an agnostic podcaster and a rabbi, was filmed while Tohn was still recovering from surgery. Her character, Esther, is the tightly wound sister-in-law of Brody’s Noah, and she spends this season trying, for once, to let go.
In season one, Esther was, in TV speak, one of the antagonists: the planner, the enforcer, the one keeping everyone in line. By the end of season two, she’d realized “everyone else was having a good time except her,” Tohn says. “She was trying to convince everybody she was fun too, while yelling at them about how fun she is, which maybe doesn’t work.”
So Esther did something drastic. She asked her husband, Sasha (Timothy Simons), for time apart, a chance to figure out who she is outside of being a wife and a mother. Season three finds her easing back into dating, and with it comes, as Tohn puts it, “a youth and a sweetness and a vulnerability that we’ve never seen from her.”
Along the way, Esther is learning she “can’t be doing everything for everyone all the time and be the producer and director and CEO of everything,” Tohn says. It’s a lesson the actress is taking to heart, too. “I only can do what I can do, and I’m gonna try and have fun while doing it,” she says. “We have that in common right now.”
For Tohn, Esther is the role she’d been waiting for. Until now, she’d “never had the pleasure of playing such a fully realized character,” she says. “This is the first time I’ve really been like, there’s this much storyline and time and energy spent on someone that I’m playing.” It’s the kind of part many actors wait a lifetime for, and plenty never get.
She has more up her sleeve, too: a movie musical she’s already written, a short about her BRCA journey she’d like to write and direct and a longtime wish to sing again, maybe even on Broadway. She’s been plotting all of this, more or less, since she was a “baby kid.”
“Now I’m like, cool,” she says, sounding faintly suspicious of her own luck. “I’m doing it.”
