Owen Thiele’s Birth Mother Called to Back Out of His Adoption. His Future Parents’ Answering Machine Changed Her Mind.

In 1996, a ringing phone in a Los Angeles home went unanswered, and a machine picked up. The caller was a Texas woman who had decided not to place her baby with the couple on the other end of the line, and she had phoned them herself to say so. What she heard instead of a live voice, actor Owen Thiele says, changed her mind about the adoption, and she left a short message telling the couple to come get their son.

Thiele, now 30 and a cast member of FX’s Adults, told the story on a September episode of Tish Cyrus’s podcast. Upworthy retold it on Nov. 9, and the account below follows those two sources.

What the Machine Said Before the Beep

The greeting on the answering machine was not a formal one. According to Upworthy, it was a recording of Thiele’s future dad tickling his future mom while she tried, and failed, to get through her lines without laughing.

That was what the birth mother heard when she called to back out. The Upworthy article says Thiele described her as someone who wanted her son surrounded by laughter, joy, support and love. In Thiele’s telling, a home that sounded like that was the one she had been looking for.

The episode description on Spotify puts it plainly: Thiele shares “an answering machine greeting that led his birth mother to change her mind about him.”

A Birth Mother Who Wanted Someone Local

Thiele was born in Houston, and Upworthy reports he was raised in Beverly Hills by music producer Bob Thiele Jr. and Amy Kanter, a detail confirmed by Hey Alma’s profile of the actor, which gives his birth date as Nov. 4, 1996.

On the podcast, Thiele said his birth mother “really wanted someone local, someone in Texas, someone who she could maybe have a relationship with.” A Los Angeles couple did not fit that plan.

He also described how she delivered the news. In his telling, she called his mom directly rather than leaving it to the agency, “as a courtesy,” to say she was going in a different direction. No one picked up, so the call went to the machine, and the greeting did the rest.

Two Podcast Guests Who Were Both Adopted at Birth

The story came up because of a shared history. According to the iHeart listing for the Sept. 17 episode, Thiele met Tish Cyrus at Raven-Symoné’s birthday party, and within minutes they realized they had both been adopted at birth. The listing gives the episode’s title as “Wait…Owen Thiele and Tish Cyrus Were BOTH Adopted?!” and its length as 68 minutes, with Thiele sharing his own story in response to Tish’s.

The same episode is on the show’s YouTube channel under the title “Owen Thiele on Adoption, Adults & Becoming Famous in a CVS.” The conversation also covers Thiele’s work and a commercial that made him briefly recognizable.

Upworthy notes that Thiele is also in Prime Video’s Overcompensating and is developing a comedy called Off Color, based on growing up as a Black child in a white Jewish family. He is set to star in it, write it and serve as co-executive producer.

How Open Adoption Is Arranged

A birth mother wanting a family nearby, with room for a relationship, describes what adoption professionals call openness. The Child Welfare Information Gateway, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, describes a continuum of openness in adoption in a bulletin for professionals. At one end is confidential adoption, where no identifying information is shared. In the middle is mediated adoption, where a caseworker or attorney passes along letters or photos. At the other end is open adoption, where adoptive parents and often the child deal directly with birth parents.

Contact in an open adoption can mean letters, emails, phone calls or visits, from every few years to several times a month, depending on what everyone needs, the bulletin says. It adds that families can choose the level of contact that feels comfortable to them.

That choice sits at the heart of Thiele’s story. His birth mother’s first instinct was a family close to home, and what moved her, in his telling, was how a couple sounded on a recording.

Adoption Month and One Phone Call

The retelling landed in National Adoption Month. The Children’s Bureau’s National Adoption Month page says the observance began as National Adoption Week in 1984 and highlights finding permanent families for children in foster care. Its 2026 theme is “A Home for Every Child.”

Thiele’s adoption went through an adoption agency rather than foster care. Still, the questions it raises are the ones every adoptive family and birth family work through: who is chosen, who decides, and how much contact is wanted afterward.

The Information Gateway bulletin notes that more birth mothers had been asking for openness since the early 1990s, and that some agencies saw placements rise after they offered those options. Thiele was born in 1996, in the middle of that shift, and his birth mother’s wish for a family she could stay in touch with fit the pattern.

The details of the story are small. A birth mother called out of courtesy, expecting to deliver bad news, and a recorded greeting gave her a different answer.

Another family on this site, an Idaho couple who got an adoption call after years of pregnancy loss, shows how much one phone call can carry from the other side of the line.

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: Pittigrilli – CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons