Brian Jordan Alvarez disect affects a subversive School comedy English teacher Pasadena California minus Brian Jordan Alvarez won viral Fame on Tik Tok with face filters now he's unveiling a rockus 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 Monday's 10 eastern daylight /p Pacific Daylight Time 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 enrio colantoni Veronica Mars after an outraged parent spots him kissing his boyfriend in the school parking lot in later episodes we meet the metome mom learned from an especially perceptive gym teacher Shawn Patton and watch Evan grapple with entitled students faculty headaches and imagined illnesses like symptomatic Tourette's Syndrome think a more subversive edgier and foulmouthed 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 Gallow was Stephanie kanig a writer on teacher who plays history teacher Gwen Sanders he has nearly 700,000 followers of those Tik Tok videos played esfan Gloria the fiance and and eventually husband of Shawn Hayes Jack in 13 episodes of NBC's Will and Grace reboot and played Cole who helped create the creepy robot in campy 2022 horror film M3 gone 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 really you know this is a hard comedy executive producer Paul Sims 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 Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok there's this guy Ben bandant and he's the kid in the pilot episode who goes if they're going to get you they're going to get you somebody had tagged me in his video on Tik Tok 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 yall 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 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 mnik director Jim buroughs and the actors too like Shawn 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