Everything's Gonna Be Okay for Josh Thomas at Home With His New Puppy

The creator and star of the Freeform series showed off the adorable puppy he adopted since going into lockdown in an interview for Inside With the Advocate.

Tracy E. Gilchrist

Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP of Editorial and Special Projects at equalpride. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.

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Tracy E. Gilchrist

May 14 2020 7:59 PM EST

May 31 2023 6:04 PM EST

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The first season of Freeform's Everything's Gonna Be Okay was just ending when creator and star Josh Thomas began sheltering in place like people all over the country. But a few weeks into his quarantine, he found a way to keep busy by adopting a sweet puppy he named Bilby (named for a desert-dwelling marsupial found in his native Australia).

He says that a lot of his time at home has been spent finding weird things to cook and potty-training Bilby by repeating "toilet" over and over.

While Freeform has yet to announce a second season for Everything's Gonna Be Okay, there's no denying that it is a changemaker in terms of visibility for teens on the autism spectrum.

In the series, Thomas plays Nicholas, who grew up with his mom in Australia and chooses to raise his high school-age half-sisters Matilda (played by Kayla Cromer who is on the autism spectrum) and Genevieve (Maeve Press) in their home in Southern California when their father suddenly dies.

But Thomas first caught the eye of TV viewers with his semiautobiographical series Please Like Me, which premiered on Australian TV in 2013.

On a Zoom interview for Inside With the Advocate, Thomas shares quarantine life and his travails training Bilby, being an out content creator and centering queer people in his work, and how he identified as straight when he wrote the pilot for Please Like Me. He also jokes about "discovering" Hannah Gadsby, who costars in Please Like Me. However, he admits that the comic, who rose to fame in the United States with her Netflix special Nanette, had a long career before he came along.