‘Adults’ Duo Owen Thiele & Jack Innanen on Igniting TV’s Coolest Slow-Burn Romance
In Season 2, Anton and Paul Baker face their feelings and the future.
Anton and Paul Baker’s first kiss was like the satisfying crack of a glow stick, sparking a reaction that’s just the right mixture of chemistry and magic.
The beauty of this slow-burn love story, portrayed to perfection by Owen Thiele and Jack Innanen, is that so many pivotal moments like that kiss could be the point of no return. For most of Adults Season 2, which dropped on August 27, the now-established housemates and legal husbands carefully orbit around each other after their post-wedding kiss, which was prompted by Issa (Amita Rao), Paul Baker’s girlfriend and Anton’s bestie.
“They have a natural fondness for each other and a really deep empathy for one another that extends beyond just Paul Baker’s general kindness and Anton’s general social perception,” Adults co-creator Ben Kronengold says. “There seems to be something that always brings them back to each other.”
In the prequel episode, “Marathon Day,” the compulsively honest Paul Baker helps Anton lie to his colleagues about running the New York City Marathon. To co-creator Rebecca Shaw, this is “essentially his first romantic gesture for Anton” and how he enters the friend group. Anton later reciprocates the gesture by marrying Paul Baker to fix the Canadian cutie’s visa issue at the end of Season 1. He even goes so far as to make Paul Baker’s dream wedding vision come true with glow sticks.
“I think what these two actors played so beautifully is that from the very beginning, there’s a little bit of a spark there, but we see all these moments of them deciding not to act on it, or deciding to sort of push it aside,” Shaw explains. Anton and Paul Baker navigate romantic and platonic relationships as their connection continues to percolate over the course of the FX show’s second season, building to their last scene in Season 2 when their love shines — or rather, glows — the brightest.
Meet-Cute
Thiele says that it was “love at first sight” when he first met Innanen, who he compares to Paul Baker in his commitment to “really hearing you out, even when you say the most ridiculous things.” Thiele jokes, “He asked me to marry him the moment he laid eyes on me. He called me a ‘generational beauty.’ I was blushing, but I knew he was mostly right.”
Innanen smiles as he recalls meeting Thiele for the first time on St. Patrick’s Day in 2024, at the six-hour-long chemistry read in Times Square. “I was so intimidated by him because he’s tall, handsome, confident,” Innanen says. “I was like, ‘OK, so that’s Anton, obviously,’ and he just owned the room, and I legitimately thought he already had the role because he was just so welcoming to everyone and [that’s] who Owen is. He was being Owen there, and then in the room he was Anton, and it was terrifyingly accurate.”
Knowing that it would be an important relationship for the show from the get-go, the showrunners didn’t have time to try every character combination at the in-person chemistry reads, but they made sure the actors going up for Anton and Paul Baker tested together.
The chemistry read scene was a variation of the car scene in Episode 7 of Season 1, when Anton is helping Paul Baker work through his mustache insecurities brought on by Annabelle (Lilah Guaragna), the brash out-of-state teen they’re hosting while she gets an abortion. “When Owen and Jack did it, they left the room, and we all had chills,” Kronengold reveals. “It was just a real electric spark between them.”
As with most great sitcom romances, the journey to Paul Baker and Anton’s romantic moment in the Season 2 finale was a gradual process, but the show’s married comedy-writing duo always knew they would get there. In fact, they almost planted a seed of Anton and Paul Baker’s connection in the pilot script, giving them a full-fledged “moment” before changing course.
“Once we realized that we had a whole season, we realized we could take our time a little bit more,” Shaw reveals. “Owen and Jack have such amazing chemistry, and they can do so much more with just one look or one little moment than we ever could have imagined. So we realized, in a nice way, we could slow our roll a little bit and let their friendship build and let their connection build, so that audiences feel themselves really rooting for them, but maybe wondering a little bit if anyone else is seeing it or if the characters are seeing it.”
A Lingering Connection
Over the course of both seasons, it’s clear that physical touch — along with acts of service, of course — is one of Paul Baker’s love languages. Even when he’s pushing his feelings for Anton down, Paul Baker doesn’t shy away from being affectionate with Anton in that way, even through just a hand on his shoulder.
Kronengold says that’s part of how the friend group as a whole operates. “This show really is about platonic love more than anything, but I totally agree with you that Jack and Owen are so great at having those moments linger maybe just a half second longer than they otherwise would,” he points out. “I think it’s subconscious for Paul Baker, as he’s making some of those early physical connections with Anton.”
Shaw adds, “What was really nice about the actors knowing from the jump where the story was going to go was that they could take their own time with kneading out some of those moments, and they just did such a beautiful job with it.”
Because of the Issa of it all, Shaw notes that “there’s a lot of gazes of longing and not letting yourself yearn and wanting to do the right thing by your friends” in Anton and Paul Baker’s cases.
FX
The actors agree that their characters are tied in their yearning, though Paul Baker is stealing glances every second, according to Innanen. “Anton has a love interest in Episode 3, and he basically shuts himself down and says no to this love interest because he has a husband, even though Paul Baker doesn’t know that,” Thiele says. “There’s something burning inside of him.”
The showrunners spoke at length with the actors about Paul Baker and Anton’s respective mindsets heading into the season. Compartmentalization was a key point they discussed with Innanen. Just like Paul Baker keeps his “bro” friend group separate from his housemates in the premiere episode, he also keeps feelings for Anton and his relationship with Issa in distinct boxes. In fact, he doesn’t even think about his feelings for Anton if he can help it. “Anton, on the other hand, we think, is staying up all night thinking about every single possible scenario that could play out,” Kronengold says.
Even in plot lines that aren’t focused on Anton and Paul Baker specifically, Kronengold reveals that they “tried to find moments where, when you feel down, when you feel confused, you turn to the person you trust the most, and increasingly, that’s becoming the two of them. Like in [Episode] 201, when Paul Baker has been feeling bad, but also defensive about this other friend group — it’s only in that moment of vulnerability that he turns to Anton to say, ‘Anton, do you think I’m a bad person?’ And they just did that so beautifully.”
The Issa Issue
Of course, Issa can’t be ignored in the context of Paul Baker and Anton’s arc. Even though it becomes clear that Paul Baker’s feelings for each of them are drastically different, the season starts off very much as a love triangle. Unlike quite a few of these tricky dynamics on TV, Kronengold and Shaw weren’t interested in having any sides of the triangle betray each other or cheat.
Issa and Paul Baker come to the mutual realization that their relationship is more surface-level in “Fake ID,” just two episodes into the second season. They bond over their physical chemistry from the jump — or rather collapse, if we’re taking “Marathon Day” into account. They hardly spend time apart from the group, and when they do, it’s all about sex. “With the push, there’s always a pull, so that then opens the door for Anton and Paul Baker to realize how much deeper their connection really is,” Kronengold says.
The showrunners never intended for Paul Baker and Issa to end up together, but they didn’t want their relationship to end in a way that would ruin their friendship. “I would have been rooting for Paul Baker less if he was someone who just threw aside the feelings of this girl that he’d committed to dating, at least for right now,” Shaw says. “It’s also so not Paul Baker. He’s so loyal. He’s so kind. He cares so much about his friend’s feelings.”
Paul Baker — possibly the least problematic common point in a love triangle of all time — also wants to be respectful of Anton and Issa’s relationship. “This is kind of an iconic duo,” Shaw says. “They have so much fun together. Some of our favorite episodes and plotlines are them getting off into misadventures. The same is true in Season 2. I think we really wanted to figure out how Anton would not want to break his best friend’s heart either. That’s not the kind of person he is.”
Thiele echoed this while sitting down with Innanen for their Swooon digital cover shoot. “I really think that he is so in love with Issa in so many ways, and then he has to push down his love for Paul,” he explains.
F I N A L L L Y
One almost-threesome and a breakup with Issa later, Paul Baker and Anton finally have a clear runway. However, it isn’t until Issa encourages Anton to be honest with himself and Paul Baker that this slow-burn romance goes from a spark to a flame.
Over the course of the Season 2 finale, Issa finds out about all the sweet things Anton has been telling voters about Paul Baker as he campaigns to be the president of the Homeowners Association. As the results are about to be revealed, Issa and Anton have a heart-to-heart at the polling site while their friends sit at home. Little do they know that their conversation is being filmed and broadcast live, so Paul Baker hears Anton’s full confession of love.
His words are as much about Issa realizing the power of her connection with Anton as they are about Anton and Paul Baker. “It was really important to us, honestly, that by the end of the season, Issa is the one who tells Anton to go for Paul Baker, not just because she’s giving him permission to date her ex, but because she knows her best friend so well, and it’s only your best friend who can say, ‘Trust me, I know you, and this is what is good for you,'” Shaw tells Swooon. “We really wanted them to almost have a romantic moment, too: them running down the street, holding hands, screaming, ‘I love you!'”
Thiele cried on set while listening to Issa’s speech. “On top of [the writing], she brought just such humanity and empathy and her real-life experiences to that speech,” he says of Rao. “And it kind of shifted into actually Amita talking to Owen, even though we don’t have a shared love interest in real life. But it felt like just two best friends connecting. And I feel like what actually ended up happening was, it was a moment for our friendship.”
Anton and Paul Baker are in uncharted territory together by the time we leave them in Season 2. Just as they find out that Paul Baker has lost the election — the outcome they needed to avoid getting kicked out of their house — the husbands come face to face. They exchange words as their friends celebrate around them, but the audience can’t hear them. After their private conversation, they kiss as balloons drop from the ceiling.
“I think in the second season they knew what this was, and they’ve been yearning for it,” Thiele points out. “It was more passion and presence than ever. They were so present with each other in that moment.”
Avery Thompson
There were several versions of this finale moment, but the showrunners never wanted the conversation between the characters to be audible. In fact, they don’t even know what Thiele and Innanen said to each other as their characters.
“No one could hear what we were saying, and it was kind of a beautiful, quiet, intimate moment,” Thiele recalls, noting that Anton hasn’t fully accepted he’s in love with Paul Baker “until he’s face to face with him saying ‘I love you’ in that scene.”
Before shooting, Shaw and Kronengold stressed to the actors that there’s still more story to tell. “We don’t think that these are two people who are perfectly ready for a happy ending, where there’s going to be no complications to the rest of their lives,” Shaw says. “We really wanted them to figure out, if you had been sitting with this for a few months, if this was a person who you felt very, very strongly about, and you finally ran to them or they ran to you, what would you say in that moment? We let them decide, and then we said, ‘Look, it’s not for the audience. It’s not even for us. Say it to each other.’ And that was what you saw on screen.”
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Innanen was particularly impressed by his scene partner during the sequence. “It was a collaborative thing between Ben and Becca and the writers, and then [Thiele] and I, about what Anton says to Paul Baker, but they kind of gave us some leeway to say what he wants to say, and he was just so impressive with how he’s so deeply caring for Anton, but also all of us, and wanting to do justice for all the characters. It was like the epitome of him caring for everyone.”
In the eyes of Shaw and Kronengold, two seasons of the slow-burn was just the beginning for Anton and Paul Baker.
“We think about the Ross and Rachels, we think about the Nick and Jesses,” Shaw says. “There’s so much fun to be had with these two people because, as a reminder, they haven’t just ridden off into a happy ending. They are still living in a house with these three other people, and we don’t know what conversation happened behind closed doors after they had the kiss.”
Now that the romantic spark has fully ignited, it’s time to get ready for Anton and Paul’s next chapter…
The afterglow.
