Los Angeles is sweltering. It\u2019s the first Monday of October, which is late for a heat wave even in a city that runs on sunshine. Morale has sagged, I\u2019m told, and the most upbeat among us have pinned their hair up in surrender. Jackie Tohn<\/strong> is the exception.<\/p>\n 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\u2019m scrambling to type them into my phone like a court stenographer. \u201cWhat murder doc am I going to watch when I get home?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tohn, 46, best known as Esther on Netflix\u2019s Nobody Wants This<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve gone through my entire life thinking, \u2018We are not a cancer family,\u2019\u201d she says. Heart attack, stroke, diabetes and high blood pressure ran in the family. Cancer, as far as anyone knew, did not.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n When she first tested positive, Tohn thought of Angelina Jolie, who revealed in 2013 that she\u2019d had a preventive double mastectomy after learning she carried the same mutation. To Tohn, removing healthy breasts sounded \u201cvery extreme.\u201d Then came her own numbers, including a 65-percent chance of ovarian cancer. Extreme, it turned out, was relative.<\/p>\n So Tohn decided not to wait. \u201cI couldn\u2019t live in a brain where someone\u2019s holding that other shoe out, and it\u2019s ready to drop, and it has a bomb in it,\u201d she says. \u201cMy brain doesn\u2019t work like that.\u201d Many carriers choose enhanced screening, which can catch a cancer early but can\u2019t prevent it, and she calls that \u201cabsolutely an option and their prerogative.\u201d It just wasn\u2019t hers. In December, she had a double mastectomy. Both breasts, pathology found, held precancerous cells.<\/p>\n Since then, Tohn\u2019s 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\u2019s count, people \u201cin the thousands\u201d have gotten tested because of her story. The ones who test positive, she says, tend to ask the same thing: Now what?<\/p>\n For Tohn, the answer started with Nina, a friend of a friend she\u2019d met maybe once at a party, who\u2019d had the same surgery and offered to meet. They\u2019d barely sat down at Alfred Coffee in Studio City when Nina suggested they head out to her car. \u201cDo you want to see them?\u201d she asked. (Them being her new breasts.) \u201cSo you could feel better about what the after can look like.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cThey look amazing,\u201d Tohn says. Not exactly how most people get acquainted, but it made a tough process a lot easier.<\/p>\n 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\u2014the ovaries or the breasts. Tohn ultimately went direct-to-implant, all in one operation. Not everyone is a candidate, she says, but it\u2019s an option worth asking your doctor about.<\/p>\n Nina didn\u2019t stop at answering questions. Instead of sending an Amazon link, she had a box delivered to Tohn\u2019s door with everything she\u2019d 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\u2019t lift your arms; and dry shampoo and shower sponges, because the incisions can\u2019t get wet. She even arranged for a recliner rental, since without arm strength, getting out of a chair is a project. Tohn\u2019s favorite was a pillow that drapes over the shoulders to shield her chest, mostly from her dogs. \u201cYou put your phone in the front,\u201d she jokes, \u201cand you look like you\u2019re part of SEAL Team Six.\u201d<\/p>\n Once she\u2019d healed, Tohn gave the box to a woman about to have the same surgery. \u201cLet\u2019s just keep passing this box around,\u201d she told her. The woman did, handing it off to a friend, and now it has a name: the Sisterhood of the Traveling Boobs. \u201cYou never want anyone to have to go through it,\u201d Tohn says. \u201cBut if you do, it\u2019s really a sense of community and sisterly support that I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever felt in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Lately, the balance has tipped toward the good. After 30 years in the business of what Tohn calls \u201cit not quite working out,\u201d things are finally clicking, and with that comes more red carpets, more press, more time in hair and makeup. It\u2019s the part of the job she\u2019s always loved, and last year, it kept her from wallowing. \u201cGetting dressed and getting glammed was a high point while I was really in the thick of all of this,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n What\u2019s changed is how she sees all of it. Until last year, she\u2019d never had something happen \u201cwhere it changes your entire perspective on the whole way you live.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve tried a million times to, like, not sweat the small stuff,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd then something like this happens and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, that literally doesn\u2019t matter at all.\u2019 I find that to be an impossible lesson to learn until you\u2019re in it.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cwoke the travel bug up\u201d in them, she says. That restlessness has followed them home, where they\u2019re gutting their house: \u201cbuilding walls and knocking stuff down and, you know, demoing the bathrooms, like really<\/em> going for it.\u201d It\u2019s still chaos, but this time, it\u2019s by choice.<\/p>\n And then, of course, there\u2019s the show. Season three of Nobody Wants This<\/em>, 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\u2019s Noah, and she spends this season trying, for once, to let go.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d realized \u201ceveryone else was having a good time except her,\u201d Tohn says. \u201cShe was trying to convince everybody she was fun too, while yelling at them about how fun she is, which maybe doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, \u201ca youth and a sweetness and a vulnerability that we\u2019ve never seen from her.\u201d<\/p>\n Along the way, Esther is learning she \u201ccan\u2019t be doing everything for everyone all the time and be the producer and director and CEO of everything,\u201d Tohn says. It\u2019s a lesson the actress is taking to heart, too. \u201cI only can do what I can do, and I\u2019m gonna try and have fun while doing it,\u201d she says. \u201cWe have that in common right now.\u201d<\/p>\n For Tohn, Esther is the role she\u2019d been waiting for. Until now, she\u2019d \u201cnever had the pleasure of playing such a fully realized character,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is the first time I\u2019ve really been like, there\u2019s this much storyline and time and energy spent on someone that I\u2019m playing.\u201d It\u2019s the kind of part many actors wait a lifetime for, and plenty never get.<\/p>\n She has more up her sleeve, too: a movie musical she\u2019s already written, a short about her BRCA journey she\u2019d like to write and direct and a longtime wish to sing again, maybe even on Broadway. She\u2019s been plotting all of this, more or less, since she was a \u201cbaby kid.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNow I\u2019m like, cool,\u201d she says, sounding faintly suspicious of her own luck. \u201cI\u2019m doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.sanity.io\/images\/0vv8moc6\/newbeauty\/9efdf1a159e8752c5840b766269a6e73efd12abd-2362x2953.png?w=1200&auto=format&q=70\")
\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"Jackie](\"https:\/\/cdn.sanity.io\/images\/0vv8moc6\/newbeauty\/a9fcc80c364d2576f041baba293e90cf7b9b822a-3000x4000.jpg?w=1200&auto=format&q=70\")
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![\"Jackie](\"https:\/\/cdn.sanity.io\/images\/0vv8moc6\/newbeauty\/1daeb0d1ec235d9b8597122b13105b3333899ad9-3000x4000.jpg?w=1200&auto=format&q=70\")