The beauty of being part of a weekly television series is, as Alexander Hodge tells it, the morning-after-airing group chat.
“We all text each other on Monday after the episodes come out and we send each other nice messages,” Hodge says of his fellow “Grosse Pointe Garden Society” cast members. “It’s interesting when you read the scripts — and we read them months ago — and then we filmed them maybe six weeks ago, and then once the edit comes back, it goes to air, and it’s nice to see the progression and see what work everybody else did.”
“Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” on Peacock, is a murder-mystery drama set in a wealthy Michigan suburb’s gardening society. Hodge stars — alongside AnnaSophia Robb, Aja Naomi King, Ben Rappaport and Melissa Fumero — as Doug, husband to Robb’s Alice.
Hodge burst onto the scene in the Issa Rae-helmed series “Insecure” in 2018, in which he played a love interest of Yvonne Orji’s Molly, who became known as “Asian bae.” In the years that followed, Hodge was continually offered similar love interest roles, which is something he contended with for a number of years.
“I would tell my team, ‘I’m ready to not play the love interest or the ideal guy in someone’s life,’ which is hilarious and ironic just because that’s such an amazing stereotype to be typecast in. What a wonderful career that would be if I was the ideal guy, the love interest,” Hodge says. “But I think I felt like there came a point where I didn’t feel challenged by it. And I wanted to feel challenged. I wanted to feel the tension of ‘can I pull this off?’ I think that’s where things feel alive and things feel challenging.”
Alexander Hodge
Courtesy of Derrick Leung
For a few years following, Hodge sought out a variety of film roles, before now finding himself back on network TV.
“As we’ve seen, Doug’s not really the ideal partner,” Hodge says. “So it was a challenge.”
Hodge initially was closed off to the idea of doing something like “Grosse Pointe.” In his words, he was “throwing a tantrum” to his team because “something hadn’t gone my way and I’d thrown in the towel, as I do once a year.” After experiencing the loss of someone close to him, he came back to the conversation with his team ready to “finish the job” — and was encouraged to take a look at an audition for “Grosse Pointe.”
“Earlier in my career, I had all these aspirations and dreams of being a really serious, struggling indie actor who came up through the award circuit at Sundance and really, really sunk my teeth into the nitty gritty. And I realized, especially being a part of this project, that there’s a reason that these projects exist,” Hodge says. “I talk to people who I’m working with, like Melissa Fumero, and people would say to her, ‘I watched [your show] “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” with my mother as she was dying of cancer,’ or other things like that. People going through a bad breakup or people going through a really hard time in their life — they weren’t putting on a f–king heartbreaking indie film. They were putting on a network television show. And I realized that this was something that reached a lot of people in a place in their lives where it meant a lot. And I learned a lot about why we do what we do.”
Alexander Hodge
Courtesy of Derrick Leung
Being part of “Grosse Pointe” then was a bit of a healing experience for Hodge to deal with his own loss, and to cultivate a lighter approach to his work, while seeing the great value in that.
“It became something aspirational for me. To embrace something a little bit more playful to embrace something a little bit…god, I think everybody involved with the show hates the fact that I say ‘silly,’ but to me, silly is such a blessing. Silly is such a wonderful privilege, to learn the art of play and to be able to embrace that as an adult,” Hodge says. “So I have taken to this show with a sense of silliness in myself, and I’m so grateful to be able to, in my 30s, be able to embrace that and explore that and see where that lives in me.”
