Justin Alvarez in a scene from his latest project, “iTwinkle,” in which he plays the villainous Tommy Duray. He jokes, “It’s another part where I have to wear eye liner.”

Justin Alvarez on track to making Hollywood dreams come true
By Katy Ciamaricone|kciamaricone@cecilwhig.com
Posted: Wednesday, January 9, 2008 3:03 AM EST

In the early 1990s when Justin Alvarez was about 7, his mom enrolled him and his brother in tap, jazz and ballet classes. By the time he reached his tween years, most of his male classmates had traded their dancing shoes for cleats, and Alvarez begged his mom, Sherri McClintock, to let him drop out too.  She finally did, and when he got to high school, Alvarez moved on to football and track. In his senior year, a friend got him interested in musical theater. “That’s when I started to be like, ‘Mom, how could you let me quit dancing!’” Then again, squeezing another activity into his busy senior-year schedule would have been tough. That year, in addition to running track, Alvarez snagged the lead role in his school musical, “Little Shop of Horrors.” He played “Seymour,” a plant-store worker who feeds his exotic Venus Flytrap human blood in exchange for money and fame.             

Alvarez had to race from play rehearsals to track practice each day after school. It was hectic, but in the midst of that chaos, he also reached a moment of clarity. “I remember, it was (the musical’s) opening weekend, and I was in the belly of the plant because it eats me,” he said. “I remember listening to everyone talking around me, and suddenly I felt, like, so peaceful. And it was such a great feeling that I knew acting is what I wanted to do.” Three years ago, he left Elkton for Los Angeles to chase that dream. Over coffee at Billie’s Chuckwagon restaurant during a recent visit home for the holidays, he told the Whig he feels like he’s on the brink of reaching it.

“Over the last three months, right around the three-year mark (of moving to L.A.), I’ve started to feel like I’m about to turn a new phase in my career,” he said, “so it’s really exciting.” After Alvarez graduated high school in 2000, he got involved in some local theater productions, and then he did his first film, a very low-budget thriller called “Primal Scream.” “Me and my buddy Toby get sucked into a movie screen,” he explained.

Alvarez then teamed up with Ron Jeremy of adult-film fame for a zombie movie. Although there was no nudity involved, Alvarez, who played “Jake,” a human surrounded by characters including “Hippie Zombie” and “Red Haired Gut-Eating Zombie,” he didn’t want to divulge the movie’s title in fear that someone might try to rent it. “It was awful,” he said. (An Internet search revealed that the movie is called “The Wickeds”). It did not embody Alvarez’s proudest moments on-screen n but then again, he was still in Elkton. A town without a movie theater is not exactly the place to strike it big in entertainment.             

Then came “And Then I Helped,” a film prepped for DVD release this fall. It’s about a girl who feeds her sick grandfather human meat to keep him alive. What Alvarez gained from his part in that film was a connection: Michael Todd Schneider, a special-effects technician on the set, happened to be looking for a roommate in L.A. “That was kind of the incentive I needed,” Alvarez said. “Up until then, my mom was like, no, you’re not moving to L.A. unless you have a job or a place to live.” In 2004, he took a two-week, cross-country road trip to California to make the move.             

“It’s scary, because you hear about people who go out there for a month, or a year, and then they (move) back,” he said. “But I knew that once I moved there, that was it; I wasn’t coming back. I really love it here n this is where my family and friends are n but what I wanted to do was out there.” Finally, that kind of persistence has recently started to pay off. “I’m starting to do stuff that people recognize,” said Alvarez, who can add some recent TV roles to his resume, including speaking parts on the hit shows “Ugly Betty” and “CSI: Miami.” “I get shot and killed by David Caruso in the end,” he said.             

In the past few months, he has also starred in commercials for Chevrolet, Mountain Dew, and Cellular South n in the latter, he is shown dancing on a bus while the actor John Cusack narrates. He’ll also be popping up on Webisodes of a new entirely Internet-based show called “iTwinkle” next month. The show is shot in green-screen format and takes place in a dark world that he describes as a cross between Las Vegas and Wall Street. It’s about a girl who’s a secretary from 9 to 5, and a punk-rocking, motorcycle-riding, butt-kicking chick by night. Alvarez plays her villainous arch nemesis “Tommy Duray.” “He’s a fun character to play, because there’s this flirtatious tension between (Tommy Dure and the main character),” he said. “She’s gonna kind of throw me out of a window, and if I survive it’s gonna make it interesting after that, because it’s like, we just tried to kill each other, but we still kind of think each other is hot.”             

Alvarez said he’s not quite a big star yet. “I still don’t feel like I’ve made it,” he said. “I’m getting gigs here and there, and I’m making money, and that’s cool. But what I want to be doing is going to work every day on a set, and at a point where it’s like, ‘Okay, this is my job.’ Right now I’m just bouncing around town doing gigs.” At that moment, a waitress who had overheard Alvarez talking about his career approached the table and asked, “Should I be getting your autograph?”             

She came back and, recalling the time she saw Elvis Presley in concert, asked Alvarez to sign her notepad, which he did graciously n perhaps practicing for the future. He said he’s basically done everything that he said he wouldn’t do when he started out in the business. “I said I’d never do horror movies, and I did; I said I’d never do TV shows or commercials, and I have. Now, if there’s one thing I really don’t want to do, it’s star in a movie with Johnny Depp,” he said with a wink.