Brian Jordan Alvarez

Submission 2,056

About

Brian Jordan Alvarez is an actor, comedian and content creator known for his 2016 Gotham Award-nominated LGBTQ+ web series The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo. Alvarez has since gone on to act in various movies and television shows, including M3GAN in 2023. Alvarez is also known for his character-based comedy on TikTok, where he plays roles such as "T.J. Mack" and an Eastern European graduate school student studying "sciemps."

Career

Brian Jordan Alvarez was born in New York to parents who worked as an electrical engineer and a Spanish tutor. Alvarez moved to Tennessee as a child, before obtaining his Bachelor in Fine Arts from USC School of Dramatic Arts.^[1]

Online History

The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo

The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo is a 2016 comedy web series about a cast of LGBTQ+ characters set in Los Angeles. The series was created largely in part by Brian Jordan Alvarez, and produced by Justin Berns. The series ran for five episodes in 2016 and received a Gotham Award nomination.^[2]

The first episode^[3] of the series was released on January 4th, 2016, and it gathered over 1 million views in seven years (seen below, left). The second episode^[4] of the series was released on February 12th, 2016, gathering over 1.4 million views in seven years (seen below, right).

Character Sketches

Alvarez has gathered over 400,000 followers on TikTok,^[5] where he regularly uploads various videos of himself doing character sketches with peculiar accents. On November 30th, 2021, Alvarez upload the first TikTok^[6] video in his "T.J. Mack" series, where he uses a facial filter to take on the character of an unspecified immigrant experiencing T.J. Maxx for the first time. The video gathered over 1.1 million views and 113,000 likes in two years (seen below, left). On May 16th, 2022, Alvarez posted his most viral video as T.J. Mack to TikTok,^[7] gathering over 3 million plays and 530,000 likes in a year (seen below, right).

On May 2nd, 2023, Alvarez posted a TikTok^[8] video where he portrayed a graduate school student of an unspecified nationality. The video gathered over 800,000 views and 100,000 likes in a month (seen below, left). On April 14th, 2022, Alvarez used TikTok^[9] to post a television interview where he was commended by Australian news anchors for his realistic and convincing Australian accent (seen below, right).