Stephanie Koenig first met Brian Jordan Alvarez 11 years ago, when they were both cast in a UC Santa Barbara student film, although both were already out of college. Their friendship was instant.
“We were making each other laugh so hard, and you could just feel it,” Koenig said in a recent video interview. “It was kismet. I remember leaving that night and going to my car, and I knew that I had met a good friend and something really special was happening.”
It’s still happening, except on a much bigger stage. When Alvarez created “English Teacher,” the new FX comedy in which he plays a gay teacher navigating the politics of a high school in Austin, Texas, he picked his frequent web comedy collaborator Koenig to play fellow teacher Gwen Sanders.
The daffy-but-sharp best buddy of Alvarez’s Evan Marquez, Gwen is infused with can-do optimism and an energy that would be right at home in a classic Hollywood screwball comedy. Koenig also wrote one of the season’s best episodes, “Powderpuff,” which runs Monday after the pilot (both episodes will be available to stream on Hulu). It gleefully demonstrates one of the series’ strengths: a deft ability to wrap a hot-button issue — in this case, drag — in a friendly package without watering anything down.
Koenig, fresh off her strong supporting dramatic performance as the go-along-to-get-along Fran in Apple TV+’s “Lessons in Chemistry,” now has a major platform to show off her considerable comedic chops, including a knack for physical comedy that feels like a natural outgrowth of countless hours as a competitive dancer growing up in Rochester Hills, Mich.
Asked whether she and Alvarez share a sense of humor, Koenig deadpans: “No, we don’t.” But it’s pretty obvious they’re on the same comedy wavelength. After a decade of collaborating, including multiple web projects, the besties are now sharing the spotlight, and the classroom.
Asked what makes Koenig funny, Alvarez flipped the script in a video interview: “What doesn’t make her funny? Everything she does is funny,” he said.” “She just has these thoughts that you see in her eyes, and it just makes you laugh and laugh.”
He also praised her abilities as a performer. “She and I often talk about how the best acting is something that we wouldn’t be able to re-create if we were prompted to; [its] just some little series of expressions that come from real thoughts that the camera picked up on,” he said. “She does so much of that. She’s so free on camera, but she’s also so reliable.”
Plus, he adds, “her writing is exceptional.”
Indeed, it’s her writing that drives “Powderpuff.” It stems from a tradition popular in Texas (and in the Midwest, where Koenig grew up), in which high school girls face off on the football field, and the football players dress up as cheerleaders.
Drag shows have become a conservative bête noire in Texas, condemned by some as a bad influence on today’s youth. But in “English Teacher,” it’s a student LGBTQ+ group that complains, arguing that the jocks are cross-dressing as a joke and undermining students who are actually trans or nonbinary.
So when the football players come to Evan for help, he decides that the guys are going to be “authentic and respectful in their performance” while going “full out.” Enlisting the help of a local drag queen named Shazam (played by real-life drag superstar Trixie Mattel), he gets the guys to go beyond just wearing dresses and applying makeup. Meanwhile, the school’s football coach, Markie (Sean Patton), brings in Gwen to coach the powder-puff players. Except after he hears about the girls’ fears and listens to a true-crime podcast, the practice turns into self-defense demonstrations that end with some variation of “boom, you’re dead.” “Powderpuff” intercuts these sessions with the drag lessons in a dual-montage sequence set to Laura Branigan’s ’80s anthem “Gloria.”
“It’s a beautiful image to see a bunch of jocks dressing in drag and just dancing,” Koenig said. “It was all just very exciting. When it was time to do the outline and pick who was going to write the specific episode, I was like, ‘Pick me, coach.’”
The episode also demonstrates the series’ refreshing tendency to zig when you expect it to zag. “What the show does so well is take a topic that people have opinions about, but then it goes the opposite way that you’d expect,” Koenig said. “It’ll take a left turn. This episode was obviously something that was going to work with that approach.”
There’s also a little behind-the-scenes irony in the gridiron scenes. Where Gwen is portrayed as inept in the ways of football, Koenig and her sister actually learned to play from their father (“He wanted boys, but he got two girls,” she said).
As a youngster, however, Koenig spent most of her time practicing jazz dance. She studied drama at Michigan State University, and after graduating in 2009, she moved to New York, figuring she would try to crack Broadway as a means toward a film career.
“I waited in those non-equity lines at 4 in the morning in the freezing cold,” she said. “I was living in a railroad apartment in Queens and just was like, ‘This is it.’” Then, her boyfriend at the time gave her some valuable advice. If she really wanted to act in movies and television, move to Los Angeles. She did when she was 23.
“I don’t have any regrets,” she said. “But I do wish somebody had told me earlier: ‘No, no, no, just go straight to L.A.’ You have to be here for such a long time to get your footing, and to move here when you’re 23 is playing catch-up.” (In fact, the shoot for this story took place at the Escondite in downtown L.A., where she worked as a server while trying to catch her break.)
She met Alvarez soon after she arrived, picked up roles in shows including “The Offer” and “The Flight Attendant” and wrote and directed a spy movie spoof (2021’s “A Spy Movie,” starring herself and Alvarez) for the web. A pilot collaboration with Alvarez came close to getting picked up but fell short. Then came “English Teacher.”
In a sense, both Koenig and Alvarez are poster children for the YouTube age. They got their work out to a loyal audience chunk by chunk, including the absurdist comedy series “Stupid Idiots” (written and directed by Koenig, starring Koenig and Alvarez). When it was time to make bigger moves, they were polished and ready.
“I’m so grateful for YouTube,” Koenig said. “We were able to find our own fans. I’m grateful that I didn’t work really early on in the industry, because I had to use my voice in order to be seen and get work. I had to direct and write. I had to put myself in my own things and just show what I could do.”
