Exclusive Interview
Inside the ‘Adults’ Threesome Scene: That Paul Baker & Anton Thigh Grab and More
What To Know
- Adults Season 2 features an attempted threesome between Paul Baker, Anton, and Issa.
- The scene featured an unscripted thigh grab by Paul Baker to keep Anton from leaving.
- Actors Owen Thiele and Jack Innanen spoke with Swooon about filming the sequence.
Adults Season 2 enters full love triangle territory as Anton (Owen Thiele) and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) try to push down their feelings for each other while Issa (Amita Rao), Paul Baker’s girlfriend and Anton’s best friend, is still in the picture. (Warning: Adults Season 2 spoilers ahead.)
In Episode 4, the tension revs up with an attempted threesome, where Issa essentially becomes a third wheel. In fact, Paul Baker keeps Anton from leaving via a thigh grab, which was unscripted.
Thiele and Innanen, along with co-creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, explained how improv led to that iconic moment, as well as all the intricacies of performing such a complicated scene. Issa, mistakenly assuming Paul Baker wants to open their relationship, ropes Anton into sharing an intimate moment with her and Paul Baker. Never mind that their acid trip is about to hit and an opossum is loose in the house.
Innanen knew it was a big scene as soon as he read it, saying he felt like a football player or dancer when executing it. Just the threesome scene took eight hours to shoot. “So much choreography went into that,” he told Swooon. “But we planned that and worked through that for like three days continuously with Owen and I and Amita, and then Ben, Rebecca, the intimacy coordinator, and the director, Oz [Rodriguez].”
On the day-of, things were moving and changing as they found what worked. “It was Owen’s idea [for Anton] to stand up because he’s like, ‘I would leave. He would ultimately put himself down to leave, and he’s like, ‘So, I need Paul Baker to stay,'” Innanen notes.
Thiele adds, “It was a hugely joint effort. The writers did such a brilliant job at writing the physicality of that scene, but things changed once it was on its feet. My whole obstacle with that scene was… why is Anton staying if he doesn’t want to hurt Issa? Enter the thigh grab…”
Though he came up with Anton attempting to leave as soon as Paul Baker starts kissing Issa, Thiele credits Innanen with adding the thigh grab itself. Innanen himself explained, “I think Ben had suggested a leg grab, and I was like, ‘That’s great.’ Or I maybe said like a leg grab, and he’s like, ‘Maybe push him down.'”
Shaw also recalled collaborating with Thiele on the sequence. “He was saying, ‘I feel like Anton in that moment would leave. I think that Anton, who has walls up, who is very afraid of overstepping, and who doesn’t want to hurt his friend Issa might take that as a moment to sort of gently extricate himself from the situation, and so he brought that to us, and we were all talking about okay, so then what would make him stay if Paul Baker wanted him to stay?'”
FX
She continued, “[The thigh grab comes from] this idea of what is the thing that could convince Anton that he couldn’t leave this room, even if he tried, and they did that just so beautifully.”
The scene, as well as the episode itself overall, was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi, who was behind Season 1’s “Roast Chicken” episode. Both are entirely contained, taking place entirely in the friends’ house.
“The three of them needed to end up in that bedroom with really different ideas of why they were supposed to be there and what the other ones wanted from this scenario, and so it really was a little bit of a magic trick to bring them into that room,” Kronengold said. “Once we were there, we worked a lot with Oz Rodriguez, our director, to find on the day what the specific actions, gestures, and romantic choreography essentially are that make each person more and more and more invested in having and attempting this threesome.”
Their threesome is interrupted when the opossum that’s loose in the house finds its way to the bedroom the trio are in. When Anton spots the critter climbing up Issa’s back, he ignores it to keep kissing Paul Baker. Kronengold considers it the “comedic moment of the season” — and it was improvised by Thiele, too.
“The moment that Anton clocks the opossum because of the sort of particularity of his angle and his sight line, Owen was improvising the moment where he sees it and decides not to say anything, so that he could keep living out this fantasy essentially with Paul Baker,” the showrunner recalled. “His performance is so funny, and then of course, when Billie [Lucy Freyer] and Samir [Malik Elassal] burst into the room, they’re all screaming, and Anton goes, ‘I’m seeing this for the first time just now.’ It’s just so, so deeply funny.”
In regard to the unscripted moments making it into the final product, Shaw explained, “It was such a testament to our actors and how dropped in they are to these characters and how protective they are of these characters.”
Adults, Season 2, Streaming Now, Hulu
