Before the pandemic, Wes Gonzales and Alison Koroly were stage performers, tried and true. Gonzales had a martial arts act with his friend Philip Sahagun in Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity, appearing in a whopping 1,165 shows. Koroly was dancing in The Illusionists, a touring live magic show whose production company, the Works, was acquired by Cirque in 2019, opening up a wealth of opportunities.
“That’s the easiest way to get into Cirque du Soleil, getting bought in,” Koroly says, laughing. “When it happened, I was the assistant resident director [on the touring version of The Illusionists]. I was climbing the rungs.”
Then, as it did to many others, the COVID shutdown of March 2020 sent the Las Vegas couple back home. Gonzales used the forced downtime to work on various projects, including an idea for a new act he hoped to shop around to Cirque’s competitors. “It was a time where I felt like I could finally catch up,” he says.
Koroly, on the other hand, “freaked out.” She had difficulty securing steady unemployment pay, since she had worked in so many different states while on tour. “I got my real estate license. I just didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I was a hostess at a restaurant; I’ve never worked in the service industry before. I did everything, just grasping at straws.”
As it turned out, a remedy for their job woes was sitting in plain sight. One of Koroly’s Illusionists coworkers, Adam Trent, introduced her to magician Rick Lax, who suggested she make film short skits for social media channels, which Lax would help to produce and promote in hopes they would go viral. She agreed, and began making clips, with Gonzales’ tentative help.
“I was a little averse to it at first, but then I started filming with her and I really enjoyed it,” Gonzales says. Previously, he had a martial arts instruction and demonstration channel on YouTube and TikTok (both @wushuwes), but working with Koroly motivated him to embrace other kinds of short-form storytelling.
“We make dramas, [comedy] skits, feel-good videos and all these different video genres that I would have never done otherwise. I mean, maybe I would have gotten to drama, but it would have been a martial arts drama,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a cheater video. Sometimes it’s just a masked prank in a Walmart. … You’re just kind of coming up with ideas and seeing what people like.”
Koroly and Gonzales’ Facebook channel, @wesandalison, offers a larger range of creative programming than most TV networks, from loopy cooking tutorials to domestic dramas to flat-out body horror. Many of the clips stretch into the 15-minute range, much of which is pure suspense (“Just keep watching until the end”) and Koroly and Gonzales gleefully chewing the scenery down to a paste. Even when you don’t particularly care what the reveal is going to be, you keep watching, engrossed by the pair’s charisma and go-for-broke commitment to the skit.
The @wesandalison channel now has more than 68,000 followers, and countless more viewers encounter the stories when they go viral. Gonzales’ @wushuwes TikTok channel, now featuring the clips he makes with Koroly, has exploded to nearly 372,000 followers. (A clip that Koroly and Gonzales conceived—an Alien-inspired chest-bursting scene—has 177 million views. Another clip in which they appeared, dreamed up by someone in Lax’s orbit, accumulated a whopping 400 million views.) Before long, they were drawing enough ad revenue for both of them to abandon their job searches and commit to making viral videos full-time.
“You don’t need Hollywood to make this kind of content,” Gonzales says. “And honestly, [viral] videos get bigger views than then most things produced by Hollywood. It’s crazy.”
Hollywood studios don’t engender expectations of new content every single day, however. Koroly and Gonzales have to work hard to keep their viewers happy. “In a three-day period last month, we filmed 34 concepts, about eight of them ours,” Gonzales says. They handle everything themselves—cameras, lighting, props, costumes, distribution and, inevitably, policing their own work to make sure it doesn’t run afoul of platforms’ community standards.
“We have grown in a lot of ways as creators, and I do think that over time, your tastes change, especially when you’re doing it for money,” Gonzales says. “You’re not just an artist anymore; you also become your own executive. When you’re sitting around the boardroom of your mind, you’re like, ‘Hmm, that could get us in trouble.’ We look at this as our job; we enjoy entertaining people. And it’s not worth putting that in jeopardy just because we wanted to be more edgy.”
In any case, it beats impatiently waiting for stage work to come calling, Koroly says.
“The type of people that we’re working around now are like-minded,” she says. “During the pandemic, instead of feeling ‘less than’ because we didn’t have a stage anymore, we all said, ‘OK, what’s next? How do I swerve?’ And no matter if this job stays this form of creation forever or morphs into something else, I think all of us are going to hang on.”
Watch Wes & Alison on Facebook @wesandalison
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