Brad Alexander Wants to Put In the Work

Brad Alexander takes the job seriously.

The up-and-coming actor, born in England, was first scouted as a model in a chance encounter that led him to the runways of Paris and Milan, the cover of Vogue Japan, and a campaign for Issey Miyake. When the pandemic halted his globetrotting, however, he chose to halt his own momentum and recalibrate his career. “It wasn’t so much of a pivot as a realization of what I actually wanted,” he explains. “Modeling was great, but it was passive. I was just stumbling around one day, and someone said, ‘Do you want to do this?’, and I said yes. I just kept saying yes until I got to travel all over the place. When COVID happened, it was an opportunity to slow down and reflect on what I want from life.”

This soul-searching led him to acting. The same day he thought, Why not?, Alexander signed up for a few extras casting agencies, more hoping than believing it would lead somewhere. Spoiler: it did. He currently stars in the first season of Hulu’s The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale which, in 2017, became the first streaming project to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.

In the moment, taking the leap was not a given. “I always was involved in drama in school, but the world of acting is intimidating,” Alexander says of his initial reluctance to let the dream in. “I come from a little seaside town in the southwest of England, and it just didn’t feel reachable or financeable. It felt out of reach.” Ultimately, the dream won out: “It was a lot of mental work to overcome that and realize that the only thing separating me from doing it is just doing it, you know?”

While modeling never turned into a full-fledged passion, it did plant the seed of the belief that he could, indeed, make it out of the little seaside town. “I’d only visited a handful of countries before I started modeling, so it was an education in people, cultures, countries, languages,” he says of his time on the fashion circuit. “I was extremely grateful for it.”

The shift in focus was total and, after abandoning a few old habits (“Acting is very scarcely beautiful. Shaking that off was probably the main consideration,” he reflects on the transition), he quickly found more reward in being an actor than a model, even if he was an extra.

“One of my first experiences was on Anatomy of a Scandal,” the 2022 Netflix thriller starring Rupert Friend and Sienna Miller, he recalls. “I was a featured extra, so I had slightly more to do than a typical extra. I got to be on a real moving set with legitimate talent and learn what the environment is, what the etiquette is. Even though I was an extra, I took it really seriously. I read the novel and I was like, I’m in this.”

Back to the initial point: Brad Alexander takes the job seriously. Thanks to his commitment, he quickly learned that you get out what you put in. “I had no expectation of anything more from that job, but because I read the novel and was talking to the director about what she thinks is true in this fiction, she said, ‘Get a radio mic on him. I’m giving you a line,’” he remembers. “That was the first bite of the bug, really.”

After working a few more extra credits and small parts (most notably a recurring role on the fourth season of another Netflix thriller, You), Alexander received a casting notice for a mysterious new project. “When I got the email, it was shrouded in secrecy. The brief was for a project called Dollhouse, so I didn’t know what it was until I got the recall, when my manager told me, ‘This is the follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale,’” he says of landing his first role as a series regular. “When it became real that I was going to contribute to the legacy of this fiction, it was as exciting as it was nerve-wracking.”

The Testaments, like its predecessor, is based on a dystopian novel written by two-time Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood and set in Gilead, a totalitarian and patriarchal society that has replaced the government of the United States. “Margaret Atwood is a literary icon. This is a woman whose material is taught in schools,” Alexander emphasizes. “I definitely understood the weight of it.”

Of the chance he got to meet her, he says: “It was insane. I’m very aware of her legacy. It’s rare that you get to encounter these types of people in life.” Though it was a brief meeting, he used it with intention. “She didn’t realize it or know it, but she’s irrevocably changed my life forever, so it was a great opportunity to say, ‘thank you,’ and, ‘I love your work.’”

Though set in the same universe, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments tell vastly different stories. Where the former focused on Gilead’s handmaids, or enslaved women forced into reproductive servitude, the latter, set fifteen years later, depicts high-society young women coming of age in a well-oiled regime that has learned to mask oppression with wealth and order.

“It’s easy to see that the life of a handmaid is a terrible one. It’s more nuanced here, where these girls have comparatively privileged lives. They’re in a bubble, with personal bodyguards and all. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but it adds an interesting new perspective to Gilead,” Alexander explains of the tonal difference.

He plays Garth, personal bodyguard to the series’ protagonist, Agnes, portrayed by One Battle After Another breakout Chase Infiniti. On one hand, Garth is from in Gilead and thus accustomed to roleplaying its mores and values, without flinching, since birth. On the other, he is secretly part of Mayday, a resistance movement aimed at overthrowing the Republic from within.

“I think people want the answer to ‘Is Garth good or bad?’, but the picture is a more complicated one,” Alexander says. “He has all sorts of conflicting motivations. He was born in Gilead and he was raised there. He’s been propagandized his entire life.” The challenge in portraying him, he adds, “was really figuring out what’s going on under the surface morally for him. Every bit of new material I got was another clue. It was ambiguous, and it remains that way, and that’s one of my favorite parts of playing Garth.”

For Alexander, the ambiguity inherent to Garth, who is both born of and against Gilead and, crucially, a man in a patriarchal regime, is the crux of the appeal. “If you had complete, perfect information about who he is and what he represents in this world, it would be less interesting,” he says. “We’re giving people a lot to discuss, and I think that’s a good thing.” He quickly adds: “Another thing to keep in mind with Garth is that it’s really not about him. This is the story of these young girls and women and their subjugation. Garth will always be ancillary.”

To bring a character to life, Alexander looks for what he can relate to or understand, personally. “Trying to find something to tether the character to in my real-life emotional tableau is my first port of call,” he explains. “I know it sounds bad, but I consider life to be data for the art. I think it is an artist’s duty to go out and say yes to a lot of stuff and have experiences and dissect them. To live your life as a lens through which you can create art.”

Brad Alexander is both ambitious and grounded, not taking any of what’s undoubtedly ahead of him for granted. When asked which roles he hopes to go after, he responds: “I’ve never chosen a role. I don’t know what’s going to come in. There are things that I like and admire about certain parts, but ultimately it’s not up to me. I’m not writing this stuff myself, so I’m a sort of a serviceman, you know?”

Asked instead to put his career’s ambition into words, he stays the course. “The goal remains the same—to continue being involved in productions with merit, meaning, and intentionality.” Alexander is driven by achieving not success but pride in his work—and he made it there a while ago. “Honestly, I felt as successful as an extra in Anatomy of a Scandal as I do now. To be here at all is a massive privilege,” he says in complete earnestness. “The goal is to keep it going.”

The Testaments is now streaming on Hulu.