Jack Innanen is doing a lot of reminiscing these days. He’s recently moved near where he lived when he first arrived in New York, and as he walks through the neighborhood now he can’t help but flash back to those early days, as harsh (and cold) as they were.
“My buddy and I moved down and we put some money together and we were like, ‘dude, we’re going to be balling out.’ We had a good budget. And we had the tiniest, s—tiest little apartment,” Innanen says. “It had an active gas leak that we lived in for a month and a half, and then we got the firemen to come and turn it off once they confirmed that it was an active gas leak. And then we didn’t have gas for four months, and so we didn’t have heat, hot water and we couldn’t use the stove from October through January.”
It’s an appropriately brutal experience of being in your early 20s and trying to make it in New York, one that Innanen taps into to play Paul Baker, the fan-favorite character on the hit FX series “Adults.” The sitcom, created by the “Tonight Show’s” youngest-ever comedy writers Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, follows a group of friends sharing a house in Queens as they navigate life in the city, and returns for a second season on Thursday. It became the breakout project for much of the cast, Innanen included, when it premiered in May 2025.
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Since then, Innanen, who got his start making videos on YouTube and TikTok, has starred in the Netflix show “Big Mistakes” opposite Dan Levy, Laurie Metcalf and Taylor Ortega, which also will return for a Season Two.
“Both shows I love doing so deeply and I love the people so deeply, but they’re such different experiences too,” the 27-year-old says. “One is a full sitcom comedy, a little absurd, a little edgy. One is crime comedy. They’re such different experiences, but truly the most fun I’ve ever had is working both.”
Part of the joy of playing Paul Baker is that he’s not that far off from Innanen himself. Like Innanen, Paul Baker is a Canadian who has recently moved to New York and is trying to find his way.
“He’s me, but so far less anxious,” he says. “He’s very sweet and I like getting to do that on camera because it’s pretty easy and fun — it’s a really fun day to be Paul Baker all day.”
Sometimes the similarities are almost eerie — to the point where more than once, he’s been reading a script and wondered how they knew that plot point had happened to him in real life.
“There was a thing in the Annabelle episode where Paul Baker’s like, ‘I moved to New York and I was sleeping on a towel on a buddy’s floor and I got scabies.’ And I was like, ‘When did I tell you guys about this?’” he says. “When I first moved to New York, I slept on a mattress topper on the ground and didn’t have any furniture, anything, and I got scabies. They’ll write things and I’ll be like, ‘I wonder if they’re rewriting my history and I’m getting new memories.’”
Innanen’s own experience of being twentysomething and new to the city helps him inhabit Baker. Though it’s hard now to imagine him not in front of a camera, Innanen was once an astrophysics student at the University of Toronto, who enjoyed making videos on the side.
“I’d really wanted to be a YouTuber as a kid, and just had this early life crisis where I hit 20 and was like ‘what am I doing? How do I actually want to spend my day?’” he says. In 2019 he switched to an art school in Toronto and when COVID-19 hit, focused even more time on making videos online.
“I was like, ‘this is what I want to be doing with my life,’” he says. He moved to New York soon after and it was here that the concept of being an actor became all the more real.
His first project was a small role in a Canadian sketch show called “The Dessert,” followed by a few others with filmmakers he knew from Toronto. His agent suggested he bring on an acting agent, and the script for “Adults” was the first project the new agent sent.
“I was biking to the West Side Highway to go for a run and I was so intimidated by it I almost didn’t pick up the call,” he says. “I called my mom after and I was like, ‘Ma, just listen to this.’”
Though he’s a proper full-time actor now, Innanen still likes to log on and return to his TikTok roots. In fact, he’ll be spending all of “Adults” release weekend doing just that.
“I’m really excited to get on TikTok and make some spam account videos about it. That’s what I am most excited about,” he says. “Not kidding, I cleared the weekend. It comes out on Thursday, I’m like, cool, so my buddy asks to get a beer on Saturday, I’m like ‘sorry, I’m making TikToks that day. I’m harassing people in the comments.’”
