[This story contains spoilers from the second episode of English Teacher.]
In the second episode of FX‘s English Teacher, Stephanie Koenig’s Gwen Sanders — a peppy history teacher with perhaps too much faith in her students — takes it upon herself to teach the school’s cheerleading team self defense.
Koenig, who also wrote the episode, got the idea from TikTok. She recalls one creator in particular who provides intricately detailed escape how-tos, should one ever find herself being strangled with a seatbelt in the backseat of a car.
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“She’s like, ‘One! Two! Fingers up, one thumb out,'” Koenig tells The Hollywood Reporter as she reenacts the comically detailed instructions. “Move them here, wrap around and twist. Now you’ve got that — you can turn your head left!”
Koenig starts giggling as she marvels at the dissonance between the woman’s good nature in posting the video and the ridiculous complexity of achieving the escape. Koenig’s character, Gwen — who serves as right-hand-woman to Evan, the titular English teacher portrayed by show creator Brian Jordan Alvarez — has a similar penchant for blind optimism.
English Teacher often finds Gwen and Evan in over their heads with the political issues dominating American education. In the same episode as the self-defense lessons — titled “Powderpuff” — Evan recruits his friend (played by Trixie Mattel) to teach the football players how to perform as drag queens.
That idea, Koenig says, came from one of the show’s other writers, who said during a pitch session that her own high school had banned their powderpuff football game over politicized concerns regarding boys dressing as girls.
“It just seemed like that was so meaty,” Koenig said of the anecdote. “Instantly, we were like: This has got to go in there.”
Jordan Alvarez wrote Gwen’s character for Koenig — the two are longtime best friends — but she joined the show as a writer first (before this, she also appeared in Apple TV’s Lessons in Chemistry).
“We just really adamantly believed in each other’s skills,” Koenig says of their friendship. “Whenever you start to try and get into this business — especially if you don’t know anybody to help you out and you’re coming from Michigan [like me] or Tennessee like Brian — there’s not a whole lot of other people, other than your family, being like, ‘You have something I believe in.’ We really bonded over that.”
Koenig says she raised her hand to write “Powderpuff” specifically because of the drag queen dancing.
“I was just so excited,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I can nail this, how to set up this performance.'”
As the football players take the field in heels, fake breasts and heavy makeup, the playfulness of The English Teacher takes center stage. “For Brian, what I think he does so well as a filmmaker,” Koenig says, is “he’s really good at making things seem like there’s a fantastical element.”
Set in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, English Teacher‘s choir of characters represents a microcosm of conservative and liberal influences that often mirror the frustrating gridlock of American politics. But the that fantastical nature of the writing still keeps the audience on its toes.
“We wanted to do it in a way that seemed surprising,” Koenig says about what’s ahead. “You never know who’s going to have an opinion about what. You assume someone is going to be against something, and they’re really for it. And it’s the other people that are against it.”
By the end of “Powderpuff,” for example, it’s the football players who fight for their right to perform in drag. “It’d be the perfect spec for the English Teacher — this episode,” she says. “The students — sometimes they’re smarter than the teachers, which is so cool. But it’s also like: We’ve got something to teach you. Everybody’s right.”
The first two episodes of the English Teacher premiered Sept. 2 on FX. New episodes air weekly Monday nights at 10 p.m., streaming the next day on Hulu.
