Westworld: How Lisa Joy Nolan became the co-creator

Lisa Joy Nolan became the co-creator of Westworld under the most inspiring of circumstances–here is her story!

Westworld took the world by storm when it first premiered in 2016, and the creative minds of couple Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy Nolan are the people behind it. A first-generation child of British and Taiwanese immigrants, Lisa Joy had a lot of pressure to pursue a career that would guarantee a stable career and money.

Writing was always her passion and she dabbled in it while attending Standford and then Harvard Law.  According to an interview Lisa Joy did with Cosmopolitan in 2017, she started writing a script for a television show that already existed and a friend of hers sent it into a TV producer. This landed her a job as a staff writer on Pushing Daisies and she also became the only female writer on Burn Notice during that time.

Lisa Joy always thought of writing as a career as a far-fetched idea that didn’t seem very possible, but of course, fate had something else in mind. Despite how busy her schedule got in pursuit of becoming a lawyer, Lisa always made time for writing and enjoyed writing fiction, poetry, and short stories.

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Given that she was attending Stanford, student debt was piling up and the idea of pursuing a career that may not result in money right away was daunting. Eventually, she started taking classes at UCLA for short stories and poetry.

When she started working at Universal, she met her now-husband Jonathan Nolan during the premiere of Memento.

As she was heading off to law school, he presented her with a box that she assumed was going to be an engagement ring but ended up being a bunch of metal rings that are used to hold the pages of scripts together.

With it, he gave Lisa a gift certificate that would allow her to buy screenwriting software thus giving her the tool she needed to make her dreams come true.

Lisa eventually passed the bar but it never quite gave her the satisfaction that writing did. When she landed the job with Pushing Daisies, she on a whim quit her current job and decided to pursue writing full-time.

Despite the haters, Lisa Joy persisted and kept writing until one of her pitches was accepted by Bryan Fuller. Eventually, she went on to work on Burn Notice and was attracted to the macho-ness of it all. Ironic considering the theme of Westworld, right?

Yearning to be a mother, Lisa Joy spent her pregnancy writing her own feature film and after selling the script, she and Jonathan Nolan were approached by J.J. Abrams about working on Westworld. Having the rights, Abrams wanted a story told from the perspective of the hosts and the rest is history.

Together, the couple created the world we now know as Westworld. Thank you Nolans, you’ve made our lives a more exciting and riveting place–and we appreciate you.