Brian Jordan Alvarez likes to work on his birthday. He tells me as much on the afternoon of his 37th this past July. We’re in a hotel ballroom in Pasadena at the Television Critics Association press tour, where he’s doing his first gauntlet of interviews to promote English Teacher, the comedy series that he created, writes, directs, and stars in.
“This is the best job in the world. So for me, if I get to work on my birthday, it’s the best gift,” he says. “And I usually have for the past few years. Like three years ago, I was quarantining in New Zealand for M3GAN on my birthday,” referring to the hit horror film featuring a murderous robotic dancing doll he starred in. The next night, he’d be flying back to New Zealand to continue filming its sequel.
“Quarantining in New Zealand for M3GAN” is quite the sentence I tell him. He laughs: “That’s going to be the title of my autobiography.”
That autobiography would need a few more chapters added to it over the next few months.
Previewing English Teacher for the scores of entertainment journalists and critics at the TCA press tour proved shrewd: It was the buzz of the conference, with everyone raving about how it was the best series they watched there. It premiered on FX Sept. 2 to universal raves.
About a gay high school teacher in Austin, Texas, who is navigating the ever-changing social mores of his students’ generation, the push-pull of his community’s conservative roots and desire for progress, and his own anxieties about his love life and career, the show’s word of mouth has been ecstatic.
On its run to Monday night’s season finale, different audience members flagged different moments and storylines that, for them, cemented English Teacher’s status as the fall’s best new TV series.
A conversation between Alvarez’s Evan and his colleague and best friend Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) in the premiere was a riot, the pair flabbergasted that the student’s wokeness has “circled back around” to being problematic: “They’re saying the r-word again!”
An episode in which Evan brings a drag queen, played by RuPaul’s Drag Race icon Trixie Mattel, to mentor the school’s football team before its annual powderpuff game was an early highlight. One in which he grapples with a fellow teacher’s desire to teach gun safety to students with a gun club—this is Texas, after all—grabbed deserved press attention. But perhaps it’s the recent episode, “Linda,” in which a powerful mom at the school (brilliantly played by Jenn Lyon) wields her power to get failing grades Evan gave his class reversed, cemented things: Oh, this show is really good.
It turns out that a high school in Austin is an ideal place to surface the complicated, often hilarious conversations that are happening around the country about everything from sexuality and identity to politics and tradition.
“That’s why it’s a show for everybody,” Alvarez says. “Because it takes place in an environment where everyone has to deal with everyone and their drama. I think anyone watching this can find some part of it to connect to.”
His instincts for these storylines “might just come from being online so much,” he says. To wit, Alvarez hit online fame the year before English Teacher’s release when a song he wrote as TJ Mack, one of his comedy characters he makes video of on TikTok, went viral. “I see so much discourse everywhere on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, and I just see so many interesting conversations. Having an opportunity to put those into a show with these different age groups in it, it just works really well.
“At its best, the show provides the bird’s eye view of how humans are in general, how they interact and how funny that can be,” he adds. “You know, in some ways, it’s a show about the joys of not getting along. How fun it can be to disagree.”
Funnily enough, Alvarez didn’t want to make English Teacher. He had spent more than a decade of his career creating webseries and pitching original projects. He was finally hitting a stride as an actor, landing plum roles in M3GAN, which is now a franchise, and in the revival of Will & Grace, playing the love interest to Sean Hayes’ character, Jack.
TV creator and producer Paul Simms, whose hit list includes NewsRadio, Girls, Atlanta, and What We Do in the Shadows, was a fan of Alvarez’s 2016 webseries, The Gay and Wondrous of Caleb Gallo. He asked to meet with Alvarez to work on something together. “I was like, ‘Oh no, I don’t think I can. I’ve tried to do that. It’s been difficult in the past,’” Alvarez says. “I had just booked M3GAN, so I was like, ‘No, I’m just acting now.’ Paul said to me, ‘You’re coming out of retirement. We’ve got to make a TV show.’”
Alvarez was born in New York City and lived in Manhattan until he was four. His father was a tramway specialist and ran the Roosevelt Island Tramway for 10 years. “Once that job was done, we moved to very rural Tennessee, like a town with a Walmart, a McDonald’s and that’s it,” he says. “Just a little town square.”
His mother got a job as a university professor in a neighboring town called Sewanee about 40 minutes away, and that’s where Alvarez went to high school. “It was this very liberal place because it was a university town,” he says. “I think all of that interplay is part of what goes into this show. These conservative environments, it’s an interesting world to explore.”
He always knew he wanted to be an actor and a performer. But looking back at his childhood, he sees now that he was always creating things, too: “I was 10, maybe 12, fully editing movies on my mom’s iMac. You know, the gem-colored iMac? I guess that bug never left me.”
He smiles nostalgically each time we talk about a memory from growing up that seems to dovetail with where he is at his career now, a spiral of full circle moments.
Landing a role on Will & Grace was pivotal for him, as a gay millennial for whom that show was so formative. “My dad always had a hard line about which shows were funny and which shows weren’t, and Will & Grace he ruled was funny,” he says. “It was officially stamped as funny in our household, and so we watched that. Of course, it was one of the only gay things I saw growing up. That’s a monumental thing to see growing up in a small town in the South.”
We laugh and roll our eyes at ourselves when we talk about how we’re both the cliché of now-gay men who forged special bonds with their English teachers when they were younger. (I can say anecdotally, but pretty authoritatively, that it’s a common experience for gay men our age who were young and closeted then.) “Maybe at that age, we’re looking for a bit of protection or guidance,” he says, shouting out his high school teacher, Claire Reichman.
Memory lane turns out to be a lovely detour when things are about to, as they did for Alvarez, rocket launch. Nothing in show business is ever a guarantee, and he knows that. Still, especially during that week among all those television critics, reporters, network executives, and publicists, there was a sense that English Teacher was destined to make a splash. The response to Season 1, which, after Monday’s finale on FX, will be fully available to stream on Hulu, proves that hunch was right.
“It definitely feels like a new, amazing level that I’m really grateful for,” Alvarez tells me, surveying this moment in his career. “It also feels like it’s just been one foot in front of the other to get here, you know? I’m just so happy to be here. Naomi Watts calls herself a ‘20 years in the business overnight success.’ Have you ever heard her say that? I think a lot of people that I really respect know that and sort of preach that: Walk calmly toward your goal, and you will get there. This is a moment I’m so grateful for, and I’ve been working toward it for a long time.”
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