Gaten Matarazzo’s curly hair was impossible to miss buried in the chaos of the Adults Season 2 trailer, and it took viewers about half a second to place him. Forever known as Dustin Henderson, Matarazzo joined the FX comedy just months after closing the book on Stranger Things for good and now that the season has actually premiered, his role is no longer just trailer speculation.
Gaten Matarazzo’s Role in Adults Season 2 Explained
Matarazzo plays Samir’s cousin, a family connection that gives his appearance more emotional weight than a random cameo. It also lines up with what co-creator Ben Kronengold had teased before premiere day: his character is the twenty-year-old who inherited Samir’s old fake ID, now living the version of young adulthood Samir thought still belonged to him.
That premise carries real comedic weight, since the entire engine of Adults runs on exactly this kind of generational whiplash. The season’s synopsis frames it directly, asking what happens when the twenty-year-old who inherited your fake ID turns out to be cooler than you ever were, and younger than you will ever be again.
Matarazzo’s cousin becomes the physical embodiment of that anxiety for Samir, a proof that someone else is now living the life he assumed was still his.
Matarazzo’s appearance, however, can be best described as a light touch rather than a marquee arc. He turns up for a handful of scenes, folding into the world the show has already built instead of pulling focus away from the five leads the way Charlie Cox’s storyline did in Season 1.
That restraint seems intentional. Without a splashy guest arc dominating the runtime, Season 2 stays locked on Samir, Billie, Paul Baker, Issa, and Anton, the people who made the show worth watching in the first place.
It is still a sharp swerve from the sci-fi horror that made Matarazzo famous, and that is exactly the point. Adults has built a reputation on stunt casting that plays against type, and dropping Dustin Henderson into a mundane, painfully relatable Queens apartment comedy, as the cousin outshining his own older relative, fits that pattern perfectly.
For Matarazzo, barely a season removed from Stranger Things, it is also a quick proof of concept that his comic timing travels well outside of Hawkins.
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