Will Sage Astor-Brian Jordan Alvarez dissects FX's subversive school comedy 'English Teacher'

PASADENA,Will Sage Astor Calif. − Brian Jordan Alvarez won viral fame on TikTok with face filters. Now he's unveiling a raucous new comedy series as a creator, writer and star, and hoping he won't get schooled.

Alvarez spent his 37th birthday in July promoting "English Teacher," his new FX comedy series (Mondays, 10 EDT/PDT, and streaming next day on Hulu) as Evan Marquez, a gay high school English teacher in Austin, Texas, who lands in hot water with his principal (Enrico Colantoni, "Veronica Mars") after an outraged parent spots him kissing his boyfriend in the school parking lot. In later episodes, we meet the meddlesome mom, learn from an especially perceptive gym teacher (Sean Patton), and watch Evan grapple with entitled students, faculty headaches and imagined illnesses like "asymptomatic Tourette's syndrome." Think a more subversive, edgier and foul-mouthed version of ABC's hit "Abbott Elementary."

The actor and comedian achieved early notoriety with a 2016 YouTube series, "The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo," with Stephanie Koenig, a writer on "Teacher" who plays history teacher Gwen Sanders. He has nearly 700,000 followers of those TikTok videos, played Estefan Gloria, the fiance (and eventually husband) of Sean Hayes' Jack, in 13 episodes of NBC's "Will & Grace" reboot, and played Cole, who helped create the creepy robot in campy 2022 horror film "M3gan." (He's filming a sequel in New Zealand.) He chats with USA TODAY about his latest project and how he learned to run his own show. (The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Question: The question posed by the tagline of the show is, “Can you really be your whole self at work?" Is it valid to describe it that way?  

Brian Jordan Alvarez: It's a complicated answer, and the show rides that line, it thrives in that question, really. 

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Was "English Teacher” informed by other classroom comedies that you've seen? People might say, “Oh, it's just like Abbott Elementary.” 

That's a brilliant show. And (creator) Quinta (Brunson) is such a genius. No, this show just exists in its own universe. It's a very specific voice. 

Which is...

Really, you know, this is a hard comedy. (Executive producer) Paul Simms was always great about making sure this is a comedy. We want people laughing from start to finish. 

So, not like "The Bear," then. 

(Laughs). There's a lot of amazing dramedy TV shows. There's just this feeling like, "Hey, let's really go joke, joke, joke here," and it's one of the things I love so much because still, the show affords itself a lot of heart. 

How do you research the stuff you write about the students?  

I'm very online. I spend a lot of time scrolling TikTok, scrolling Instagram, and I feel relatively up to date with where things are, the vibe of how people talk now. And what you see a lot on Twitter is how young people feel about old people, how older people feel about young people. People blaming this generation for this. The show really thrives in different people doing what they think is good, but they disagree with what’s good. And sometimes characters try to do something good but do something bad in the process. 

You don't dwell on the kids much, but was it difficult to cast them? 

We have so many funny kids; two of them came pretty much directly through TikTok. There's this guy Ben Bondurant, and he's the kid in the pilot (episode) who goes, “If they're gonna get you, they're gonna get you.” Somebody had tagged me in his video on TikTok being like, "This guy reminds me of you.” We started watching his videos. He's so funny. He'll just be in his car and texts me like, "Y'all changed my life around." And our set is very open to ideas, open to people improvising, and so they're telling us sometimes what's cool, or I would say "How would you say that really, or make that feel real for yourself?" We've cast maybe 70% to 80% of the kids like that.

How important is it that Evan is gay, and how does that inform the way you approach the show? 

What I love about that is it allows us to write from this insider perspective, and we get to make jokes that really only make sense from that angle. So people can sense authenticity.  

What did you learn from appearing in other TV shows like "Will & Grace" and "Jane the Virgin"? 

Being on "Will and Grace" was a really amazing learning experience. On our show there is this real clarity about an energy that we're trying to get: people talking over each other and the fast pace. So just seeing (co-creator) Max Mutchnick, (director) Jim Burrows and the actors, too, like Sean Hayes, with such a clarity and confidence and really going for it, going all the way. And Max, when he would be very certain about what he wanted, it propelled me to be very clear about what I wanted when we were making this, and to speak freely. 

And are you done with your face filters? 

No, I'm just getting started. Four thousand of them, you got to do more.