Shooting the Disney+ comedy series Adults in Toronto last year was, says Lucy Freyer, “honestly the most fun experience of my life”.

Freyer plays Billie on the sitcom about a bunch of twenty-somethings sharing a house in Queens, the least glamorous of New York’s five boroughs. And for the 29-year-old from Cremorne in Sydney’s inner north, the series marks the big break she’s long been hoping for.

Freyer moved to New York aged 17, straight out of Wenona, an all-girls high school in North Sydney, to pursue the acting dream, via a year-long acting class in the Big Apple.

“I don’t quite know what my parents were thinking,” she says of the day in February 2014 when she packed her bags and headed to the other side of the world. “I remember I got a cold when I first moved here, and I couldn’t buy cold medicine because you have to be 18 to buy cold medicine. I was like, ‘What am I doing?’”

She gives full credit to her parents – her mother works in real estate, her father breeds racehorses – for backing her to pursue the bug that first bit when she was rehearsing for the primary school play (as a teen, she studied at the Australian Theatre for Young People, whose famous alumni include Nicole Kidman, Toni Collette and Rose Byrne).

“They were like, ‘Go for it’. And had I not had that intense support behind me, I don’t know that I would have had the guts to do it. I think when you’re a bit younger you don’t have as much fear, because you don’t fully understand all the things that could go wrong. I can’t imagine doing a big move like that now, you know. It’s scary.”

After that first year, she spent 12 months “sort of figuring things out”, before getting into Juilliard, the prestigious arts school, where she spent the next four years honing her skills.

Life after graduation, though, was much like it is for most other struggling actors in the Big Apple. Though she scored a decent role in the 2023 Owen Wilson comedy Paint (playing the muse to a public TV celebrity artist called Carl Nargle, based on the real-life Bob Ross), it was slow going … until Adults.

“I’ve done a bit of theatre, an off-Broadway play, but this is the first time I’ve sort of existed in the world and felt something’s a bit different,” she says. “It’s the first time I’ve been recognised for anything on the street. But it’s interesting because at the end of the day, the work all feels the same. But it is a leap, I guess.”

The appeal of the show, which was recently renewed for a second season by Disney’s FX channel, is its relatability. With its fixations on social media, self-image and cancel culture, it’s very much about the now; but in its exploration of the pros and cons of the intense bonds formed in your 20s, it’s timeless.

And for the young cast, life had a certain way of imitating art while the series was in production.

“The five of us were working pretty much every day that we were scheduled for the shoot, and we were all staying together,” says Freyer (it’s pronounced fray-uh). “They put us all in the same apartment building, and some of us were on the same floor, and we would constantly be in each other’s rooms.”

Appropriately enough, the biggest apartment was occupied by Malik Elassal, who plays Samir, whose parents own the house in which the gang are living rent-free.

“And so we would all congregate in his room every night,” says Freyer. “We would film 14-hour days, and then come home and order food together and sit up for two more hours and chat.”

There were, she adds, a few specific moments offscreen that echoed things that were happening onscreen too.

“It got a little scarily like the show,” she jokes. “There was one time Amita [Rao, who plays Issa] had a medical situation, and so Owen [Thiele, the show’s Anton] and I went with her to the ER, and the nurse came out and she was like, ‘You can only bring one person in with you’. And so she had to decide who it was gonna be.”

That scenario is uncannily like the plot of the second episode, in which Billie has to go to hospital because of a medical emergency (triggered by the stress of losing her job), in the company of Samir and Issa, but has to choose one of them as her proxy in case she is incapacitated.

“We were like, ‘This is insane. This is too much’,” she says.

There was another incident, too, when Freyer decided to cook a Thanksgiving meal for her castmates – just as Billie does for her housemates and her much older boyfriend in the show’s hilarious sixth episode. And it went just about as well as it does on screen.

“The smoke alarm was going off, and I was trying to waft the smoke away with a tea towel, and we were all like, ‘We’ve been here too long’. It was ridiculous.”

The dialogue between real life and screen ran both ways, with show creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw being on permanent alert when hanging out with their young cast.

“Someone will say something, or someone will do something, and they’ll both look at each other and start writing things down,” says Freyer. “And we’re like, ‘you can’t have that’.”

One change the show has wrought is in Freyer’s living situation. She’s recently moved from Manhattan’s upper west side, where she’s lived for 10 years, to Brooklyn, where most of her friends are. And more importantly, she’s flying solo.

“This is my first time living alone, ever,” she says. “I’ve had roommates the entire time I’ve been in New York, which I’ve always loved, but it’s nice to have my own space.”

Given the interplay of screen and real world, perhaps we should expect Billie to move out and get her own place in season two. Whatever happens, the continued success of Adults will rest on it being able to tread the fine line between seeing the funny side of its young characters’ concerns without ever losing empathy for them.

“The thing that Ben and Rebecca have always said is it’s so important with everything we do that we’re never punching down,” says Freyer. “If there’s a joke, we’re in on the joke, it’s not at someone or something’s expense. We’re never punching down.

“That’s why I think they’re so clever, the two of them, in what they’ve created. It’s never mean, you know.”

Adults is now streaming on Disney+.

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