By Paul Horsley

Alex Saxon may be a star of TV and films these days, but he gives a lot of credit to the firm theatrical foundation he received growing up in the Kansas City area. From the age of eight the Liberty native, currently starring in MTV’s hit show “Finding Carter,” acted, sang and danced with companies such as the Bell Road Barn Players (Bye Bye Birdie), Just Off Broadway Theatre (Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical), Padgett Productions (Grease), and most notably the Coterie Theatre (The Breakfast Club Live).

“Theater engenders a level of professionalism,” Alex said. “It gives you a perspective on what you’re doing in terms of, The show must go on, and in terms of serving the story. Instead of all the byproducts of what goes with this work. … I think I am grounded in that, just the joy of doing it. I love the immediacy of the work.” Hollywood is full of young actors who haven’t done theater, he said, and the difference can be noticeable. “Theater prepares you well. You have three jobs right off the bat: Show up on time, hit your mark, and know your lines. And I take all three of them very seriously.”

It was the Coterie and Harvesters Community Food Network that brought Alex to KC this November, for a public appearance that drew TV fans and philanthropists alike. Alex had been looking for ways to become more involved in charities, and locally based Harvesters seemed like a good fit. As it happened his schedule allowed him to be home for the holiday and also appear at the opening of the Coterie’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. “And what better time for food drives than around Thanksgiving?” he said.

Alex grew up in a medical family (his father is an ENT specialist in Liberty and his mother is a nurse with her own skin-care business), so it seemed natural that he would aim for premed in his studies. As a child he acted and danced and sang, but he didn’t really think of it as a career option at the time and he put it on a back burner in high school and during his first years at William Jewell College.

“My ambition, from the time I was three years old, was to become a doctor,” Alex said. “School was just for learning and studying and getting prepared to go to medical school.” But had a change of heart after sophomore year and switched majors, to Philosophy and Applied Critical Thought and Inquiry. In the process he realized that, medical ambitions notwithstanding, he wanted to take acting as far as he could. Long story short: After graduation, he moved to LA and began to take small film roles and occasional parts on TV shows (“Ray Donovan,” “The Fosters,” “The Mentalist”).

But it’s his solid work in the role of the troubled, sweet-natured Max in “Finding Carter” that has made the biggest splash, and this season his character (who was originally scheduled to be killed off, literally) became a series regular. Along the way he’s found that his roots on the stage have helped ground him in show business. “That’s another great part of growing up in theater, is that everybody is there really to put on a good show,” he said. “I might have naively walked into Los Angeles thinking that’s what I was going to find: It’s been interesting to see that that’s not the case. There are people here who aren’t really thinking about the work, who aren’t dedicated to acting, to telling a great story.”

For a while Alex was jetting back and forth between L.A. (where “The Fosters” was filmed) and Atlanta (the locale of “Finding Carter”), and then Wham! At about the same time his character in the former series began to fade away he discovered that Max, the intense, long-haired blond in “Finding Carter,” was about to be eliminated as well. “I went through the five stages of grief,” he said with a laugh.

All was not lost: The producers had been impressed with Alex’s improvisational skills in several early scenes: Viewers had especially noticed a crouton-making bit with his TV girlfriend Taylor (played by Anna Jacoby-Heron) in Season One. He had improv’d quite a bit in the pilot of “Finding Carter,” too, which is not normally encouraged among young actors but in this case stood him in good stead.

“I just started altering lines and ad-libbing, and it all ended up in the pilot episode.” Later, the series’ then-coproducer Terri Minsky pulled him aside and told him to keep it up. “It was a dream job,” Alex said, “in the sense that they didn’t know how the character was evolving, and we were kind of figuring it out together.”

Terri Minsky later told Cosmopolitan, on the decision to reconsider the character of Max: “(We thought it would be) like “Game of Thrones” where they kill Ned Stark, and we were going to be that fearless! But then Alex comes on set and every single thing he does is so adorable and charming and sweet and heartwarming. It was just this collective, ‘Why would we kill this guy? That’s idiotic.’ ”

For all his theater background, Alex says that in the final analysis TV and film are a more natural fit for him. “My work tends to be a little more subtle or nuanced in ways that don’t always translate onstage.” It was this realization that led him to film and TV. “That’s the medium I really connect with. That’s why I went to Los Angeles and not New York. … I work well in close-ups. It’s just a proclivity toward that style of communication.”

Food bins for the 2015 Harvesters Food Drive are at Crown Center during the Coterie Theatre’s run of A Charlie Brown Christmas (through January 3rd). For tickets and information go to thecoterie.org. Also see harvesters.org.

You can find Alex on Twitter (@saxonalex) and read more about him at imdb.com.

To reach Paul Horsley send email to paul@kcindependent.com or find him on Facebook (paul.horsley.501) or Twitter (@phorsleycritic).