Owen Thiele Is TV’s No. 1 “Nepo Friend”

“I famously don’t sleep. I sleep two hours a night,” says Owen Thiele. The 28-year-old scene-stealer is being grave. Sort of. “It sounds like I’m a vampire,” he says, starting to riff. “I actually can’t be out in the day. I need to be invited into a home.”

Yet somehow, Thiele is wide awake when I greet him at the Plaza Hotel one afternoon in behind schedule April, ready to sip tea while spilling tea about his breakout year. But first, Thiele has another confession: “Can I be honest? I can’t read,” he jokes after receiving an overwhelmingly long menu. We settle on the Palm Court restaurant’s signature sandwich and savory tower, which comes with specific instructions that it is designed to be eaten from bottom to top. “Eloise must have been scared,” Thiele says. “I didn’t know it was a horror movie.”

He seems to be living in his very own cringe comedy. But Thiele’s also making waves in a fictional series, ascending from bit parts in Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave and HBO Max’s Hacks to a supporting turn in Prime Video’s Overcompensating and a starring role in the Nick Kroll–produced FX ensemble comedy Adults. “I’m so lucky that some of my friends are making movies now,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Is there a role for me? There’s going to be a role for me. You’re writing me in. That straight white man is now going to be a Black gay guy.’”

“I got so spoiled that my first movie was with an ensemble of my dreams and all of my friends too,” says Thiele. That movie, the critically acclaimed 2023 mockumentary Theater Camp, was codirected by and starred his best friend, The Bear’s Molly Gordon; and included her ancient pal, Tony-winner Ben Platt; Platt’s now husband, Noah Galvin; and Gordon’s The Bear costar Ayo Edebiri, among others. Thiele made the most of his miniscule screen time as a theater camp costume department head named Gigi Charbonier who, according to Vulture, got “most of the best lines” in the film. “Theater Camp was home for me,” he says. “We were just making bad theater with your friends, which I was very used to doing.”

Thiele grew up in Los Angeles, and he knows Gordon from Crossroads, the prestigious private school they both attended. (Other notable alumni include Gwyneth Paltrow, Jonah Hill, and Maude Apatow.) “We had this class called ‘life skills,’ where you would go around in a semicircle and just talk about your day. It was therapy class,” he says. “Sometimes people would choose to confront other people in the class. It got messy.” He was also in the actual drama club—which was called “conservatory” and lasted all day in Thiele’s telling. “Conservatory was a small group who would put on plays from lunchtime until 8:00 p.m.” I point out that his experience makes Crossroads sound like the West Coast version of New York’s famed LaGuardia High School for the performing arts. “Yes, and it worked better for Timmy Chalamet,” he replies.

Born in Houston, Texas, Thiele was adopted as a baby by his parents, music producer Bob Thiele Jr. and Amy Kanter. “I was adopted into a white Jewish family, and then I went to a school called Center for Early Education, and then Crossroads. Very white spaces,” he says. As a child, it took Thiele a long time to realize his situation was out of the ordinary. “It was just my childhood,” he says. “Because my parents were white, I was like, ‘Oh, this is normal.’”

That changed as time went on. “You grow up and you start reading things. You meet other people who look like you. And you’re like, ‘Wait, you don’t look like any of my family,’” he says. Coming to terms with being the only Black person in his family was strange, but also not always uncomfortable, Thiele says. “I was like, ‘Oh, in this white space, I’ve actually never felt different,’ which is so rare,” he adds. “Most people would hear that and be like, ‘What the actual hell is going on?’” But for Thiele, the answer is quite basic: He loves his parents. “I am their kid, and we’re family,” he says. “I never felt different in my family, which is a beautiful thing.”

Thiele doesn’t currently have a relationship with his birth parents, but he knows he could reach out to them if he wanted to. “I just haven’t chosen to yet,” he says. “I have birth siblings that I don’t know, and I’m too afraid to reach out.” Which may not have stopped his siblings from contacting him. “The other day I got a DM saying, ‘I’m your brother,’” he shares. “Can you imagine?” The DM rocked Thiele so much he dropped his phone on the floor.

But rather than engaging, Thiele left the DM alone. “I didn’t answer because it’s like, Is this a prank?,” he says. “If Cynthia Erivo came out and said she was adopted, her DMs would be flooded with, ‘I am your brother.’ But for me, nobody knows me like that. So I’m like, ‘It actually might be.’”