Apparently the easiest way to discover how close a television cast has become is to ask whether any of them secretly reads other people’s text messages.
Vanity Fair has put the stars of FX’s Adults into the Hot Seat, and the resulting conversation rapidly becomes less of an interview and more of a group intervention.
Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Amita Rao, Owen Thiele and Jack Innanen appear together in the new video, released alongside the arrival of Adults Season 2.
The rules are simple.
Ask uncomfortable questions.
Point at whichever cast member is most likely to be guilty.
Then watch the accused attempt to defend themselves while four friends provide additional evidence.
It does not take long for the strategy to work.
The five actors play Samir, Billie, Issa, Anton and Paul Baker in Adults, the FX ensemble comedy about a group of twenty-somethings sharing Samir’s childhood home in Queens while attempting — often unsuccessfully — to behave like functional grown-ups.
Off screen, the cast appears to have developed almost exactly the kind of chaotic group dynamic the show is built around.
The Hot Seat begins with questions about privacy.
Have they ever read somebody else’s text messages?
Several members of the group initially try to distinguish between deliberately snooping and simply looking at a phone that happens to be available.
That distinction does not survive very long.
Lucy eventually admits that she has checked the phone of her boyfriend of ten years, before joking that people absolutely should not do it.
Her castmates are not entirely convinced by the warning.
The conversation then expands to the much more dangerous category of reading strangers’ messages over their shoulders.
Apparently, public transport offers opportunities.
Then Vanity Fair asks for the strangest place anyone has ever hooked up.
One cast member recalls breaking into a school bus at night while still in high school simply to kiss someone.
The rest of the group immediately becomes less interested in the romantic element and much more concerned with the logistics.
Why the bus?
How did they get inside?
Why drive to school in the middle of the night?
And, most importantly, was anyone caught?
The answers only create more questions.
One of the funniest segments arrives when Vanity Fair asks which member of the cast is a “friend slut” — someone capable of walking into a room and emerging with an entirely new social circle.
The group quickly identifies Amita Rao and Owen Thiele as an especially dangerous combination.
Malik describes the way they move through parties by comparing them to the classic mobile game Snake: every new person they meet simply gets added to the growing social tail behind them.
The evidence apparently includes ending up alongside DJs at parties and somehow becoming connected to complete strangers’ families.
Amita casually mentions attending someone’s grandmother’s 80th birthday.
For this cast, that apparently qualifies as a normal social progression.
Owen receives another unanimous vote when the question becomes who would flirt with a bartender for free drinks.
His castmates are confident not only that he would attempt it but that he would probably succeed.
That leads into stories about Owen’s ability to talk his way through situations, including one travel problem that apparently escalated until he was communicating with extremely senior people at United Airlines.
His friends describe him as a “doer.”
Owen offers a slightly less flattering description of his customer-service alter ego.
The conversation becomes even more revealing when celebrity DMs enter the Hot Seat.
Asked whether anyone has ever messaged a famous person specifically to flirt, the group barely allows the question to finish before attention shifts around the room.
The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes.
There is discussion of rappers.
There are jokes about repeatedly messaging Drake.
There are apparently several names nobody is particularly interested in revealing publicly.
No successful celebrity romance is announced.
But the willingness to send the message is clearly not the problem.
Social media produces another confession.
Asked whether anyone deleted old posts before becoming famous, the answer is an extremely enthusiastic yes.
One member of the cast describes going through Twitter with specific keywords and systematically deleting anything that might become professionally inconvenient later.
The motivation apparently came partly from a college teacher who had already warned them that their Twitter presence was not especially professional.
It is perhaps the most authentically 2020s career preparation imaginable.
Forget acting classes.
Search your own username plus dangerous keywords.
But nobody receives a more sustained intervention than Jack Innanen.
The question is simple:
Who is most likely to leave everyone on read?
The answer is Jack.
Immediately.
Unanimously.
Jack attempts to explain that he is simply a bad texter.
He sees messages.
He responds mentally.
Then he forgets to actually send anything.
Reasonable enough.
Unfortunately, his castmates have evidence that he is very much using his phone during these periods of supposed digital absence.
Lucy points out that she can text Jack and receive no reply, only to discover several minutes later that he has liked her Instagram Story.
Another castmate remembers seeing him like an extremely questionable Reel while still failing to answer messages.
What begins as a game suddenly becomes a full-scale communication intervention.
Jack argues that modern society has made one device responsible for too many different things.
Being on Instagram, he explains, does not necessarily mean he is emotionally available for texting.
His friends are unmoved.
Eventually they force him to look towards the camera and record personalised promises to respond to each of them.
These clips are apparently intended to become evidence the next time he disappears from the group chat.
The Hot Seat also reveals some unexpectedly specific pop-culture habits.
Lucy admits that she once became fascinated by Mormon family vloggers from Utah, following entire families across multiple YouTube channels despite acknowledging that the videos were not necessarily interesting.
She initially describes this as something from years ago.
Then the group discovers she still knows what members of the family are doing today.
So perhaps the phase never completely ended.
Owen offers a different confession when asked whether he has ever practised an acceptance speech.
He has not.
What he does practice is arguably stranger.
Owen sometimes looks into mirrors and introduces himself to himself.
“Hi, I’m Owen.”
The idea, he explains, is to understand what someone meeting him for the first time might see.
He may rehearse the greeting before an interview or while riding in an elevator.
His castmates initially describe the behaviour as mildly sociopathic before gradually deciding that it makes a disturbing amount of sense.
Unfortunately, they have now also adopted the habit.
The entire group sometimes enters rooms saying, “Hi, I’m Owen.”
There are also questions about lying to one another and the extremely dangerous territory of dating a friend’s ex.
The group largely agrees that hooking up with a close friend’s former partner falls firmly into friendship-destroying territory, although one actor recalls giving a friend permission to date an ex after being asked first.
Somehow, amid all the confessions, the strongest impression is not scandal.
It is friendship.
Adults works because its five central characters exist in one another’s lives with almost no boundaries.
They know each other’s romances.
Failures.
Jobs.
Bad decisions.
Medical problems.
Crushes.
And increasingly complicated relationships.
Watching the real cast together makes it easy to understand why that chemistry translates so naturally to screen.
They know exactly who will flirt with the bartender.
They know who will make friends with everyone at the party.
They know who has embarrassing internet habits.
And they definitely know who is going to ignore the group chat while scrolling Instagram.
Season 2 of Adults brings Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Amita Rao, Owen Thiele and Jack Innanen back as Samir, Billie, Issa, Anton and Paul Baker, continuing FX’s Gen Z spin on the classic hangout sitcom.
But Vanity Fair’s Hot Seat reveals that the fictional roommates may not have a monopoly on chaotic group dynamics.
Sometimes the most uncomfortable question is simply the one your co-stars already know the answer to.
Watch the Adults cast take Vanity Fair’s Hot Seat below.
