What To Know
- Adults star Amita Rao breaks down Issa’s encounter with that possum in Season 2’s episode “Raccoon.”
- Plus, series creators Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold discuss working with animal performers and the installment’s connection to “Roast Chicken.”
Adults Season 1 may have seen the friends at the center of FX‘s comedy going through their “Roast Chicken” phase of life, but Season 2 is upping the ante with some critter chaos in the equally frenetic episode, “Raccoon.”
Just as Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Issa (Amita Rao), Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), and Anton (Owen Thiele) drop acid for an eventful night in, they realize a raccoon has broken in, lured by the smell of a fresh-baked pie Anton left on the windowsill. With less than half an hour until the drugs kick in, it’s a race against the clock to locate the critter and get them out of the house.
But there’s more drama to be had than a mere stray raccoon as Issa and Paul Baker relay to Billie and Samir separately that they’re hoping to address problems in their relationship. Meddling occurs on all sides, and after a Love, Actually-inspired poster moment, Issa is led to believe Paul Baker wants to open their relationship.
At this point, a possum has joined the mix among stray animals in the home, and they pop up in the bedroom where a near-threesome unfolds between Issa, Paul Baker, and Anton. That is, until the fuzzy creature gets involved, climbing onto Issa’s back!
FX
“I went on the weekend to meet the animal trainer so we could get acquainted, before we hooked up,” Rao jokingly recalls of working with the possum. “It was just so awesome. He was really small and really cute, and he ate food like applesauce off my shoulder. I loved him.”
While there was a real animal on set, there was also a possum puppet for more involved moments, like when Issa yanks the animal off her back and waves it through the air before sending it out the window. “The possum puppet is so much bigger than our little tiny possum we worked with,” Rao adds, noting, “he didn’t like loud noises, so we had to like pretend during the scene where we’re screaming.”
“Obviously you’re sort of like keeping your fingers and toes crossed the whole time when you’re working with animal actors, but it turned out really well, and obviously we did not use them for the stuff where [the cast was] really interacting with them, but it was pretty fun,” muses cocreator Rebecca Shaw. “Our actors were all kind of pros about it.”
“Yeah, they were game,” cocreator Ben Kronengold chimes in.
The episode, which unfolds in real time, offered “a neat bit of parallelism,” Shaw points out. “I’m told acid takes about half an hour to hit, and that’s about how long we have for an episode.” Ultimately, she says, “We thought of this episode in some ways as a little bit of a companion to ‘Roast Chicken’ in Season 1… both of which were written by our wonderful writer Sanaz Toossi.”
Shaw adds of Toossi, “She’s just a master of that. She’s a playwright. She’s actually won a Pulitzer Prize, which is crazy, but she just did such a wonderful job, and we want to do one like that every season.”
“We’d be so lucky,” Kronengold says. We couldn’t agree more. What did you think of the possum moment in Adults Season 2? Sound off in the comments section, and stay tuned for more on the newest episodes.
Adults, Season 2, Streaming now, Hulu and Disney+