Photo: Hannah Whitaker Shiny, sage-green shards of porcelain peek out from beneath a potted philodendron. Julio Torres, the co-creator of two new HBO comedy shows and the writer behind Saturday Night Live’s most delightfully melodramatic digital shorts over the past two and a half years , hasn’t cleaned it up, it seems, out of respect for the life and death of the now-shattered vase it once was. He tells me he’s still in mourning.
I’m visiting on Clothes Organizing Day, and the contents of Torres’s closet and drawers are on his bed. He tells me he gets rid of things but also that he can’t stop buying lamps or acquiring delicate objects that he often breaks. He can’t help himself when it comes to beautiful things.
His comedy doesn’t tend to be overtly political, but if you were to punch in all the characteristics most likely to get Donald Trump frothing at the mouth and then ask a computer to spit out a person, it might look a lot like Torres. He’s not just an immigrant from a Central American country beset with troubles from MS13; he’s defiantly queer, fantastically talented in an utterly original way, and embraced by Hollywood.
Fred Armisen in particular was paying attention. Every time he saw a sketch he liked on SNL, he’d text the producers to ask who wrote it, he says, “and most of the time it was Julio.” So when Armisen sold the idea for Los Espookys, HBO’s first primarily Spanish-language original series, he called up Torres and fellow Brooklyn alternative comic Fabrega to help write and star in it, along with two accomplished Mexican actors, Bernardo Velasco and Cassandra Ciangherotti, they found through casting.
After HBO got interested, Armisen, Torres, and Fabrega holed up in L.A. and pounded out the pilot, then Torres and Fabrega took over writing duties for the rest of the series. “We were typing in English but thinking in Spanish, or at least I was,” says Torres. Though Los Espookys was meant to be about Mexico City, it was eventually shot in Chile and set in an unnamed fictional country, mainly because the cast had so many different accents.
“I feel like, truly, my life as a comedian has been looking at my life, taking out adolescence, dragging that to the garbage, and then moving back to childhood,” says Torres. “I’m constantly revisiting childhood through what I do. Coming up with stories, playing pretend, dressing up, projecting narratives onto objects or toys.” Growing up, he lived in a bubble of his own creation.
juliothesquare jadabird He is hysterical! Congrats juliothesquare it’s time both nbcsnl and HBO had some new blood! freshenitup
juliothesquare jadabird I watched it last night with friends I thought would NOT get it and they were laughing! I loved it too. Bravo!
juliothesquare jadabird Why does he remind me of Stephan?
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