Owen Thiele Compares His Adults & Overcompensating Characters

Owen Thiele is fully in his TV star era. Not only is he navigating his messy mid-20s in NYC on FX’s Adults; he’s also going back to college as the queer voice of reason on Prime Video’s Overcompensating. While both coming-of-age shows delve into some similar comedic territory, Thiele tells Elite Daily he feels much more closely connected to his Adults character, Anton, than Overcompensating’s George.

“They’re opposites,” Thiele says. “I identify more with Anton, because that’s kind of where I am in life. Like, I’ll drop my dry cleaning off and forget to pick it up for three months. My socks don’t match.”

While Anton is often on the struggle bus, George seems to have everything figured out. Even though the Overcompensating character is still in college, he fulfills the role of a wizened queer elder for the closeted Benny (Benito Skinner).

“It was so fun to play this, almost, gay daddy that Benny looks up to,” Thiele says. That part was a bit of role reversal of Thiele and Skinner’s actual relationship. “In real life, Benny was kind of that for me. I remember watching his social-media presence blow up and thinking to myself, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do,’” Thiele says. “He was so himself, and he would play these characters with wigs, and I was just so impressed by everything he was doing.”

Though he feels his Adults character is closer to his real personality, Thiele doesn’t fully relate to Anton. “Anton is a little more emotionally reserved,” he told Elite Daily in a separate interview. “He struggles with being open and actually being himself, whereas I am, sadly and fortunately, an open book. How I relate to him is we both love our friends so deeply. I believe in them so much that I will always ask to be put in their things till the day I die.”