No Longer Just a Nepo Friend

After years in celebrity orbit, Owen Thiele is taking center stage.

It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Owen Thiele is buying me a Power Card at Dave & Buster’s. He’s in from Los Angeles and wanted to do something touristy — plus, he says, “I’m a full-on Disney adult. I’m down for any games.” When we start playing Jurassic World: Jungle Jackpot, he gets a text from his mother, who received a message regarding the Dave & Buster’s charge. “My mom’s texting me about
a fraud alert,” Thiele says. He explains that he never checks his account, so he has his credit-card alerts sent to his mom. “She’s very involved in my life. Too much. So it’s a disaster but also my favorite thing in the world,” he says. “My friends and other family members would say it’s a disaster.”

After years of being the type of person who pops up on the Instagram page of a one-degree-removed famous person, Thiele is rapidly becoming an actual know-him-by-name famous person: Over the past few months, he has sold a TV show about his own life (which heavily features a version of his over-involved mother); was cast in FX’s Snowflakes, described in Variety as a “twenty-something ensemble comedy following a group of codependent housemates”; and got his own podcast on Alex Cooper’s Unwell network. Thiele is from Beverly Hills and was adopted at birth by a well-connected Jewish family. (His father, the music producer Bob Thiele Jr., helped create the theme song of The Office.) “My mom had cervical cancer, so she couldn’t have a baby,” Thiele tells me chattily after resolving the credit-card issue. “So I think why we’re so close is because she couldn’t have a baby of her own and she’s like,
I finally got one. I’m not giving this up.” He had an extremely Hollywood childhood: His parents sent him to study theater at the Adderley School in Pacific Palisades (he was the only boy and thus had to play both the Beast and Gaston in Beauty and the Beast) and enrolled him at Crossroads, a school with many children of celebrities, where he quickly befriended the David sisters (first Romy, then Cazzie).

He’d always wanted to be an actor and chose the NYU Tisch School of the Arts for college with the idea of studying theater, but he dropped out after a month. “I call it a month; my parents call it a week,” he says. In 2015, Thiele moved back home, until his parents said (in his words), “We love you, but you have to go anywhere else.” So he started working with Cazzie to develop her web series, Eighty-Sixed. She played Remi, a dry-witted woman trying to “win” in a breakup with her boyfriend. Thiele played her funny best friend, Owen. “Cazzie was always the mean, scary older sister,” he says of their friendship. “And I was always vying for her attention. And then finally she gave it to me and
I was like, ‘I’ll do anything you want.’ So she cast me in her web series, and it was really fun.”

Eighty-Sixed only made him more certain he wanted to act. But he wasn’t getting any roles — in fact, casual encounters with acquaintances seemed to be doing more for his public profile. “I call myself a ‘nepo friend,’” he says, shrugging. At lunch at a friend’s house, he met Hailey Bieber; a few weeks later, she asked him to be in an episode of her YouTube interview series, Who’s in My Bathroom? (She also gave him her phone number, which led to a distressing incident: “I have many friends named Hailey, and I just put Hailey in as ‘Hailey’ because I didn’t want somebody to be like, ‘Oh, that’s Hailey Bieber,’ and steal my phone. Knock on wood,” Thiele says, actually knocking on an adjacent table. “But then I did something bad. I FaceTimed Hailey Bieber four times thinking she was my dear friend Haley Daniels. Four times, probably 1 a.m., one night. Can you imagine?!”) He filmed TikToks with Emma Chamberlain, whom he met through his boyfriend, Jared Ellner, who was rapidly developing a career of his own as a stylist. His friendship with Cazzie landed him in not one but two Taylor Swift music videos. He has a theory for why celebrities take to him. “I approach them like a fan,” he says. “When I met Hailey, I was like, ‘I’m obsessed with Rhode. I wear it every single day. I eat it for lunch. You’re my idol.’ I mean, you can’t just be like, ‘Hey, girl.’ You’re not their peer.”

He kept auditioning and managed to land a handful of small roles, he tells me as we amble down the escalator to Applebee’s. He popped up in Dollface (as “Q, a new Woom employee who becomes the girls’ cooler and younger confidante,” per Variety) and Hacks. In 2022, The Bear actress Molly Gordon, with whom he has been friends since their days at the Adderley School, was writing her movie Theater Camp and cast him as chaotic costume director Gigi Charbonier, who bosses around the campers, in acrylic nails and a jaunty scarf. Despite the bit part, a lot of the reviews focused on his performance. (This magazine said he “gets most of the best lines,” and another described him as a “grade-A scene-stealer.”) His own show, Off Color, came soon after by way of Ilana Glazer, whom he met through his manager. The logline, in part: “He’s gay and Black, they’re all Jewish, his mom should be on Real Housewives, and his cousin’s a former party girl turned rabbi-in-training. The comedy is about a son who doesn’t want to grow up and a mother who has no intention of letting him.” As he assembled the writers’ room, he began to call Glazer his “comedy mommy.”

Thiele is not lacking for comedy mommies. A few months after the Glazer meeting, he was at a dinner party with Call Her Daddy podcast founder Alex Cooper, telling the table about how he sleeps only two hours a night. He generally has no one to talk to when everyone else is sleeping. (He used to call his mom, but “she’s getting older, which is so fucked up and rude.”) This gave Cooper an idea — what if he podcast for her during those hours he was up? By August, she was announcing Thiele’s new show, In Your Dreams, and asking her followers to welcome “the funniest person I know” to the network. “People were like, ‘Who the fuck is this?’” he says. “‘And what drama is he involved in?’ And I was like, ‘Nothing.’ I think Alex thought people knew who I was when she signed me.
I really, really scared the network.” But his intro on Call Her Daddy killed. He was quippy and quick, an on-camera version of the funniest person in the friend group. (He tells Cooper a story about getting into a hit-and-run — someone hit him, and he ran because he was late to a nail appointment.) “I’ll be honest, idk who this Owen person is … but I’m OBSESSED now,” commented one woman. Others recognized him from their own parasocial relationships. (“Does anybody know anything about him,” wrote someone in a Reddit thread about Thiele’s new podcast. “Good friends with Cazzie David,” replied one. “Emma Chamberlain’s best friend,” wrote another. “Dating Jared Ellner,” a third.)

Thiele is the first Black person on Unwell, “like I was the Black friend at Crossroads,” he says, dragging a fry through barbecue sauce. “Someone has to do it — that should be in my bio.” (It sort of is, actually: His Instagram bio reads “diversity hire .”) I ask if his life has changed since the podcast came out and his autobiographical show was announced. Not really, he says. He’s still basically a nobody, for now. “There’s nothing about me online,” he adds. “There’s nothing really about me on that Reddit InfluencerSnark. But I’m ready. Actually, I’m waiting.” 

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the October 7, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.

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