103 MINUTES WITH ...Owen Thiele

The ultimate L.A. nepo friend” sold a show about his own life.

- IRA MADISON III

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 overinvolved mother); was cast in FX’s Snowflakes, described in Variety as a “twentysomething 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 wellconnected 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