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Fans of surrealist comedy and cinema, rejoice.
Brooklyn-based comedian, writer and filmmaker Julio Torres (a Saturday Night Live staffer best known as the co-creator of HBO’s Los Espookys and Fantasmas) makes a one-night guest appearance on Friday, Oct. 18, in Tomorrow Theater’s Carte Blanche series (where featured guests can make any kind of show they want) in a talk titled “Forever Baby.” Torres says he will be “talking with the museum about my thoughts on pastel, soft millennial design” to examine how his generation’s distinctive aesthetics reveals its members’ place in the world. The talk ties well into his next passion projects: self-producing a calendar and, maybe one day, a signature line of home goods.
“I’m a renter, not an owner, and I want to come up with ideas to make a space feel your own even though it’s not literally your own,” Torres says. He wants to make, “beautiful versions of things that are normally not beautiful, like a plunger or a hamper.”
Torres describes himself as “creatively scatterbrained,” an assessment that’s clear if you look at his 12-year career. Along with his SNL and HBO work, Torres has performed stand-up on Comedy Central, written for The Chris Gethard Show, done a multimedia special and authored I Want to Be a Vase, a picture book about the interior lives of everyday household objects.
“What I’m learning is that my process is generally the same throughout mediums,” he says. “It almost feels like the goal is more or less the same but the expectations are different.”
Most recently, Torres wrote and directed the film Problemista, which premiered at SXSW in 2023, was released by A24 in March, and will screen right after his “Forever Baby” talk. Through it all, his unique voice comes through—confident, self-aware, innovative and a little dry but never smug. His writing is where his love of comedy always shines through. For Torres, it’s where everything, from his veganism and queerness to shapes and aesthetics he likes, are an avenue for introspection and humor.
There’s a hyperactive quality to his work, where you can practically see the wheels spinning in his head. Even his 20-minute Comedy Central stand-up special throws in an element of multimedia in the form of a talking crystal. Torres refuses to be boxed in by the standards of the form he’s working in. Instead, he treats the artistic process like a playground where he can have fun and make his own rules.
“I wanted to be a writer, and I was realizing that most of the work I liked and the kind of ideas I had were humorous in some way,” Torres says. “Being a comedian ended up being the entry point.”
Torres has always wanted to write movies but came about directing his own script mostly through a desire to maintain his own voice in his art. Informed by his experience as a Salvadoran immigrant, Problemista marks Torres’ directorial debut. Co-starring Torres’ idol, Tilda Swinton, Problemista touches on the overwhelming bureaucratic hurdles one endures while trying to start a new life in a new country, with the stress Torres’ character endures from these hurdles portrayed in absurdist dream sequences.
“I’ve been an admirer of hers for a very long time,” Torres says of Swinton. “She was, frankly, a concept to me—an idea of the kind of artist I really admired.”
Coincidentally, in his 2019 multimedia special My Favorite Shapes, Torres makes a quick joke about Swinton. Years later, when Problemista was in preproduction, the script got into Swinton’s hands.
“She very quickly raised her hand and said, ‘I want to be in this,’” Torres says.
Problemista’s release gave cinephile Torres the chance to enter the Criterion Closet, a series run by the Criterion Collection where artists choose films from their catalog and talk about them. Calling it “the chicest, most dignifying and legitimizing piece of press I’ve ever done” (hey, no hard feelings), Torres discussed, among others, Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy (1987–94), Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (1977) and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999).
“This past year, I am starting to learn where I think I will fall with my career,” he says. “I like to think I’ll do the kind of work that made me want to create—the things you discover and stay with you.”
SEE IT: Julio Torres: “Forever Baby” at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St., 503-221-1156, tomorrowtheater.org. 7 pm Friday, Oct. 18. $65 walk-up only.