A lot has been made of Alex as gay representation, but I haven’t really seen anyone talk about what he does for stereotypes of anxiety.
Every performance narrative I have ever seen that attempts to depict anxiety, in books, tv, movies, whatever, has the anxious performer anxious about performing. Sometimes it’s depicted as a hurdle to overcome; sometimes the character running to the bathroom to puke is played for laughs. ALWAYS it is stage fright.
I’m a performer, and part of the reason I am is that I learned early on that the stage is the only place where I’m not anxious. Onstage, I am in control. The audience is here for me, they can’t judge or scold or shun me unless I let them, and at the end of the night they go home. If we ever meet again, it’s because they liked my work and want more. It is a level of control over interaction that cannot be replicated in anything more intimate, and so a level of relief that I don’t know how to describe to people who haven’t experienced it.
Alex loves music. He genuinely expresses a desire not only to play, but to perform and become famous from it. He’s never afraid of a show. Do you realise how huge that is? Anxiety that doesn’t follow every non-anxious person’s favourite, easy-to-relate-to narrative? As a kid my anxiety was constantly invalidated because “you’re a dancer, how could a conversation scare you when you go up onstage all the time” - or, alternately, people would infantilise me come showtime because they couldn’t be bothered to listen when I said I was fine.
Alex isn’t afraid to perform. Nobody treats Alex like glass around shows. He jumps into improvisation as easily as his non-anxious bandmates. There is no anxious character who has ever made me feel more seen and understood in this regard than Alex Mercer, and I think that’s worth talking about
