‘Adults’ Team Breaks Down Dinner Party Chaos With Charlie Cox’s Dancing & That Raw Chicken Reveal

Meaghan Darwish May 30, 2025, 5:57 pm

Charlie Cox, Lucy Freyer, and Malik Elassal in 'Adults' — Rafy / FX

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Adults Season 1, Episode 6, “Roast Chicken.”]

FX‘s new comedy Adults has landed on Hulu, and with it, a potential new classic dinner party episode. The sixth installment of this first season is aptly titled “Roast Chicken,” which is served up in quite a state by guest star Charlie Cox.

The episode revolves around Billie (Lucy Freyer), who has decided to throw a dinner party to impress her new boyfriend, referred to by her pals as Mr. Teacher (Cox). Eager to enter the “roast chicken phase of life,” Billie tasks her friends Samir (Malik Elassal), Anton (Owen Thiele), Issa (Amita Rao), and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) with helping her put the event together by dressing up, serving hors d’oeuvres, and chatting up the guests.

In addition to Mr. Teacher (who we later learn is named Andrew), the friends are anticipating the arrival of Paul’s friend, Jules, who turns out to be the Julia Fox. All chaos really breaks out, though, when Mr. Teacher arrives at the door high out of his mind on ketamine, a “pony dose,” as he puts it. Knowing how desperately Billie wants the evening to go smoothly, Samir is daunted by this challenge of wrangling a wandering and dancing Mr. Teacher to be present for the occasion.

When Mr. Teacher ends up in Samir’s room, though, he looks at a yearbook and reflects on how weird it is for him to be dating a former student. It’s not exactly ideal timing for such realizations, and things go from bad to worse when Mr. Teacher mentions he needs to break up with Billie.

Owen Thiele, Malik Elassal, Jack Innanen, and Amita Rao in 'Adults'

Rafy / FX

In an attempt to protect her, Samir tries reasoning with Mr. Teacher, but that’s difficult when the man’s living in his own little ketamine world. When everyone eventually sits around the table to dig into the chicken Billie’s been roasting, most everyone is horrified to find the chicken is inedibly raw. The high teacher doesn’t take issue with it as he carves the meat for the table and eventually takes a few bites himself.

In the end, Mr. Teacher locks himself into a bathroom, likely ill from the consumption of the chicken, which Billie didn’t realize she had to thaw out before cooking in the oven. Meanwhile, Mr. Teacher’s ex-wife has to come pick him up, and Julia Fox comes to the conclusion that she will never attend another dinner party at Samir’s house.

“That episode in particular, we knew by week two or three in the writers’ room, was going to be really special and feel different,” executive producer Stefani Robinson tells TV Insider.

As for bringing in Charlie Cox, who is best known for his current role as Matt Murdock in Daredevil: Born Again, “We knew that we wanted someone who was charming, who was disarming, who seemed trustworthy, but also had the ability to devolve into a gross, sweaty ketamine fit, that was also funny,” Robinson continues. “So we knew that we were looking for somebody who understood how to ride that line and was open to it, and he was our first choice.”

“When we talked about this character of Mr. Teacher, it was really important to us that he’s someone who Billie would start to see as a metaphor in some ways, as this projection of some competent adult life. And over the course of a few episodes, we’d really watch that veneer get stripped away, and we’d start to see this person as someone going through a divorce, who’s maybe drinking a little too much, and doesn’t have it quite as figured out as we think,” says series co-creator Rebecca Shaw.

Rafy / FX

When it came to the vision in their minds, co-creator Ben Kronengold adds, “[Charlie] rendered it so beautifully.” He notes that it was going to be “a tough sell,” getting audiences to believe in Billie and Mr. Teacher’s relationship without the right performer. “The fact that we root for it at all is only because of Charlie and Lucy, who plays Billie. They have incredible chemistry together.”

Freyer confirms as much “Charlie’s amazing. We just hit it off immediately when we first met. He is such an easy person to work with, and we wanted to make sure the first two episodes that he’s in felt like a romcom until it didn’t,” Freyers adds. “I think bottle episodes of TV shows are always my favorite,” she notes of the installment’s contained format, citing The Office and Friends as past examples. “I think it was such a fun thing to get to have our own.”

Elassal was eager to lean into the drama of the episode. “That might’ve been my favorite thing that we filmed the whole season, was when Mr. Teacher is upstairs in the bathroom, and I have to tell Billie that he was breaking up with her. That was my favorite,” Elassal shares. “I loved filming that. It felt so sweet, and Lucy’s so amazing in that scene.”

Meanwhile, much of Issa, Anton, and Paul’s story revolves around the evening’s other guest, Julia Fox, who Rao reveals was quite the improviser. “My favorite part about that episode was definitely improvising with Julia Fox. She’s an unbelievable improviser, and it was so fun to play with her,” Rao says. But she was also quick to credit Cox’s range of emotions at the table, saying, “His physicality is f**king unbelievable. I was always so impressed by how many emotional conclusions he reached [in that scene].”

Rafy / FX

“Julia Fox is a living icon and a genius,” Thiele says, adding, “she’s a ray of light.” Thiele reveals he previously worked on a film with Fox, during which he was so nervous he could barely speak with her, but that experience allowed him “to get my nerves out” and “study her” performance during this occasion. “Working with her and Charlie and the amazing cast at one table was the highlight of my life.”

Meanwhile, the big joke about Julia Fox’s arrival is that Paul doesn’t realize who his friend Jules really is in the context of pop culture, which is something Innanen can’t relate to. “That is so the opposite of who I am, where I need to know everything that’s going on at all times. But it was really fun… He is almost too innocent, too pure for his own good.”

As for the big raw chicken finale, “The idea of it was so disgusting and funny to us, but as it got closer to actually making it happen, I had so much fun watching all the tests,” muses Robinson, who reveals, “We had an amazing food artist come in and essentially construct an edible [prop that] looks like raw chicken.”

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“Our brilliant director of the episode, Jason Woliner, spearheaded multiple meetings about this chicken,” Shaw recalls. According to her, the kind of questions that arose from building this prop were, “What do we want it to look like on the outside? What do we want it to look like when it opens? What’s the noise it makes? How do you make something squirt out of a chicken? But also many a safety meeting because we had real and prop chickens on set and we had to make sure nobody was eating raw chicken.”

In other words, no raw chicken was ever consumed in the making of this hilarious episode, but it looked real enough to prevent people from reaching for the popular protein in the immediate future. What did you think of Adults‘ dinner party episode? Let us know in the comments section below, and catch the rest of the season.

FX’s Adults, Streaming now, Hulu