Owen Thiele Is Everyone's Best Friend

In Marie Claire's Meet Cute, we have a chance encounter with pop culture's latest man crush.

As I write this, Owen Thiele is getting dressed for Taylor Swift’s wedding.

The actor and podcast host admits he is “delighted and terrified” at the prospect of attending the Event of the Century™, which is the appropriate emotional combo meal for a rising star like Thiele. (“You pronounce it thee-uhl,” he says kindly when we first meet in a low-key but perfect Greek place called Kyma in Manhattan.)

Born in Texas and raised in Hollywood, Mr. Thee-uhl has the kind, firefly-bright eyes of a favorite English teacher and the wit of a Jane Austen heroine. He can speak with easy fluency about underrated pop albums, overrated restaurants, and the joy of randomly seeing your cousin at Erewhon. On TikTok and Instagram, he makes jokes about being a “diversity hire” while running circles around other online comedians. A current bit includes getting salsa lessons from Maluma; another video shows him hyping up his “outfit of the day” without knowing where any of his clothes actually come from. Whether online or on television, Thiele somehow manages to exude the vibe of someone you really want to hang out with. Celebrities like Hailey Bieber and Sabrina Carpenter and, of course, Swift herself already do. For the rest of us, there is plenty of Thiele on-screen lately.

Currently, Thiele stars as Anton, the compassionately cool goof in Adults, FX’s deadpan take on Gen Z living that’s about to release its second season. The 29-year-old Scorpio has had laugh-out-loud turns in the TV shows Hacks and Overcompensating, and wildly fun indie films like Theater Camp and Idiotka. He also hosts "In Your Dreams," a podcast on Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network that draws a rotating cast of internet-famous and Hollywood-adjacent guests. It’s broadcast from a bed surrounded by Y2K fan collages—Hannah Montana! Lizzie McGuire! Camp Rock!—and includes occasional interruptions from Jared Ellner, the celebrity stylist who is also Thiele’s longtime partner.

Through Ellner, Thiele has learned “how to chill out a little bit” and how private and public dynamics don’t need to be reconciled. “Everyone who sees us together thinks I’m the talker,” he says as we settle into a lunchtime booth. “But what you’d never know is that when it’s just us, he is the talker! I’m pretty quiet, I swear.” Ellner has also guided Thiele on how to dress for a pop mogul’s wedding (he wore a crisp black Saint Laurent tuxedo with a satin cummerbund to the Swift-Kelce nuptials) and that “the fashion world is way scarier than Hollywood.”

Thiele has something of a home court advantage when it comes to stardom: He was raised by prolific music producers; his grandfather is responsible for the 1967 hit “What a Wonderful World.” (“My middle name, Louis, is actually for Louis Armstrong, who sung the song.”) One of Thiele’s second cousins is the storied comedian Bob Balaban; another is, somehow, Jodie Foster’s child. (“We don’t really get into it,” Thiele says cheerily.) From the ages of 6 through 17, Thiele attended Crossroads, the L.A. nepo-hub that has educated all manner of elite, from the outstanding (Kate Hudson, Maude Apatow, Maya Rudolph) to the frightening (Spencer Pratt). “Am I a nepo baby, too?” Thiele asks as we devour the watermelon salad we swore we weren’t hungry enough to eat. “I mean, people call me one and maybe it’s true. But it’s also more complicated than that.”

Here’s what Thiele means by “complicated:” Adopted at birth by a white Jewish family, Thiele grew up affluent and “obsessed” with his parents. (“I think I would have literally jumped off the tallest building if I had to share my parents’ affection with anyone!” he exclaims.) Their house was also “the party house” for holidays, birthdays, and rollicking backyard barbecues, where “a revolving door of people were constantly coming in…I truly had the most wonderful childhood.”

Thiele credits his parents’ thriving social life with early training in both friendship and social graces. He also notes that they surrounded him early with “Black role models” like the punk musician Justin Warfield, and “queer role models” like his aunt Sid. Still, it’s not easy being the only Black kid at Rosh Hashanah in Beverly Hills. “Now I can laugh about it,” says Thiele, “but as a kid, I was going to a white woman in Beverly Hills and asking her for a blowout! That’s not exactly hardship, but it’s strange.”

When I ask if Thiele follows conversations about transracial adoption on social media, including adoptees who have spoken critically about separation from their families of origin, Thiele shakes his head. “I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, but I have chills thinking about my parents, in the best way.” He speaks of a recent encounter with his mom’s best friend. “She told me, ‘Owen, I don't know if I believe in God, but once when I look at you and your parents, I believe someone's up there.’ And literally, I feel the same way. It was so meant to be, so that's the beautiful part.”

He takes a breath. “The not beautiful part is that as a kid, I was asking for a side-part in my dreadlocks and nobody was saying, ‘Hey, maybe there’s something else we can do.’” The actor says that as he got older, “I realized the full extent of being a Black man in America. I thought, ‘Oh god, I have to take this seriously…I’m not a tiny little white girl walking around my neighborhood.’ When people would look at me funny when I was walking in Beverly Hills, I realized, ‘Wait, they think I’m, like, plotting a burglary!’ Which was just so dark and sad and scary.” He admits he is “still processing this wakeup call” and the way his racial and queer identities intersect with the Hollywood world that shaped him.

Partly to suss all this out, and partly because fish-out-of-water narratives are the protein on the sitcom food pyramid, Thiele is currently developing an autobiographical Prime Video scripted series, Off Color, with Broad City co-creator Ilana Glazer. “I met her when I was still really young, like 24,” says Thiele. “I was so ready to jump into the comedy scene and she was ready to accept me.”

Before they can dig into the new material, however, Thiele has a heap of current work on his plate that would make any actor—much less “a certified NYU dropout like me!” as he gleefully exclaims—swell with pride and cower in stress. Currently, it’s trying to “promote the fuck” out of Adults, which comes back for season 2 on August 27. “In Hollywood, there’s this saying that you never know if a project is going to work until it’s done. But I swear, with Adults, you could see it on the page. [Series creators] Ben Kronegold and Rebecca Shaw are such good writers…and then once we were cast, they integrated parts of us into the show. I knew from the first day on set that it would be amazing.”

But building the Adults audience took some time, and after season 1’s debut, Thiele says he waited over six months to be called back to the Toronto set. “It was very anxiety-inducing and very emotional for us, because we wanted to be back so badly! We love each other! And I found myself questioning my instincts for the first time. I was like, ‘This show is so funny. If it didn’t hit, does that mean my sense of what’s good is just off?’”

It was not. Season 2 of Adults filmed from December 2025 to May 2026, and Thiele reports that the FX network “gave us complete creative freedom” to make the comedy they wanted to see in the world. Meanwhile, both The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter noted Thiele’s performance for its warmth and—in Gen Z parlance—yearning. In fact, one of the new season’s funniest plots focuses on Thiele’s Anton, a hyper-popular but secretly lonely city kid who can make friends with anyone, coaching a grieving boomer parent (played by Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Susie Essman) through basic Facebook etiquette. An oft-referenced season 1 storyline saw Anton become besties with a new neighbor who turns out to be a serial killer.

“This would absolutely happen to me!” Thiele admits in a fit of laughter. “But I think Anton befriends everyone because he’s really terrified of being alone, but totally unable to be vulnerable with other people. And I would do it because I’m kind of the opposite. I’m so open that I want everyone to be just as open with me!...I’m constantly trying to get other people to explain what makes them tick.” This is an easy sentence to fact check. At least four times in the span of our interview, Thiele interrupts himself to ask me what I think, how I feel, or if either of us should “just fuck it and get bangs” (no) or “just fuck it and get french fries” (yes).

That easy familiarity is also pushing Thiele’s second current project, the "In Your Dreams" podcast, into cult hit territory, as evidenced by increasingly A-list guests like Lizzo and Suki Waterhouse. He says when Alex Cooper of "Call Her Daddy" fame first approached him about doing a show, he was worried he wouldn’t have enough material. “I just rambled into the camera, and Alex was like, ‘No, Owen, put that out. Exactly that.’ I was worried it was gonna rot people’s brains because it’s just me telling stories and getting other people to tell stories. But in this age of AI, being human is the opposite of what’s gonna rot our brains. Being human is kind of the solution to that…And the big part of being human is being interested. Computers can’t be excited to hear from you.”

But Thiele cannot worry about future computer overlords because he is filming season 2 of Overcompensating, a college comedy set in 2010 about a queer athlete (Benito Skinner) coming out of the closet. Thiele plays George, an “elder” (read: upperclass) gay hot kid who tries, often disastrously, to coax Skinner onto the Yellow Brick Road. “I based the whole character on Raven Symoné in That’s So Raven,” Thiele says with a grin. “The coolest queer mentor ever on TV!” After Overcompensating, it’s on to Peaked, a comedy from Thiele’s Theater Camp co-star Molly Gordon about badly behaved grown-ups at a high school reunion.

And of course, there is the T. Swift wedding. Thiele and Ellner were invited “the old-fashioned way,” he says—meaning, “she said ‘you’re coming to my wedding’ when she cooked us a beautiful meal” of flaky white fish and rice pilaf. “She's an unbelievable chef,” Thiele insists, “to the point where Jared looked at her and said, ‘Are you hiding a chef in a closet?’ She was like, ‘No, I cooked it.’ She’s kind of one of those girls that’s good at everything, you know? Like those girls from high school?...She’s even funny, genuinely funny. And I work in comedy, so I don’t think anyone is funny. I think she can do literally everything.”

That includes talent spotting. Swift cast Thiele in two of his first-ever roles—as a pool party bestie in the 2019 music video for “You Need to Calm Down,” then again as a fellow office bro in “The Man”—before he began blowing up. “I met her at an agency party, and she’d seen Eighty Sixed, which was a web comedy I did—the only thing I’d really done!” Swift got his number and texted him about the videos, which led Thiele to believe he was getting scammed. “Yeah, right, Taylor Swift is texting me. But she was.” Thiele says he found out when the video hit YouTube because of her fans. “The tags. The mentions. My phone died.”

I ask Thiele if he would like the level of success that leads people, one day soon, to track his own friendships with the zeal of a parasocial executive secretary. “Oh gosh, no,” Thiele says, and his eyes say he really means it. “I think of fame as Lindsay Lohan; always getting chased and having to be so intentional about finding your peace.” He mentions that last year, Hailey Bieber came on "In Your Dreams," “and two days later, there are still paparazzi outside of my house looking for her. She handles it all with such grace. I…would not.”

I ask Thiele what he means. “Well, first of all,” he says conspiratorially, “I would ask the paparazzi’s names. Then I would make them sit down with me and explain how they became a paparazzo. If it was affecting their mental health. Why they wanted to take pictures of famous people, you know? They wouldn’t get anything done. I would just keep them talking.”