On New Year’s Eve 2020, comic and actor Julio Torres made the decision to splurge on himself. He headed to Mociun, a jewellery retailer in the Williamsburg location of Brooklyn, N.Y., and picked out a delicate oyster earring — a dangly minor handle to rejoice the finish of a challenging calendar year. When he shed it a lot less than 24 hours afterwards on the floor of a nightclub, it felt like some variety of omen.
“It was my 1st time donning it out, and I misplaced it quickly,” he mentioned, laughing at the memory. “Literally no one particular saw it. I put in hrs and hrs with my flashlight on the dance floor making an attempt to locate it. I just couldn’t get about the symbolic pounds of losing it at a New Year’s Eve get together.”
In the vehicle on the way property, with all hope of finding the earring gone, he decided that if this were being some sort of signal from the universe, he was going to make it a excellent just one.
“I assumed, ‘F— it. I’m gonna make a display about this.’”
“Fantasmas” is the fruit of these initiatives — an HBO comedy that follows a fictionalized model of Torres on a mission to find his misplaced earring. For some (possibly most), the loss would not have been more than a mundane annoyance of currently being alive. But as he proved with ”Los Espookys” and his attribute directorial debut, ”Problemista,” Torres has a knack for homing in on the mundane and spinning it into the fantastical and absurd.
The 6-aspect collection, which premiered previously this month at the television-centric ATX Competition in Austin, Texas, performs out like a fever aspiration. As Torres can make his way by way of a hazy, kaleidoscopic New York, he encounters a menagerie of figures, all loosely linked to his search and all consumed by their own quests (for adore, for id, for reason).
“I have completely zero plan what any person will make of it,” he mentioned.
When we fulfill, he’s just landed in Austin, a number of several hours before his premiere. But rather than currently being anxious, Torres felt exhilaration to eventually see how an audience would respond to the notion he’s been sitting down with for the previous four many years.
Like most of his jobs, ”Fantasmas” stands by itself in the Television landscape. It plays out a little bit like a sketch exhibit, with the audience shelling out time inside of a variety of vignettes, next figures we could or may perhaps not ever see again. There are also dozens of common faces — guest stars include Steve Buscemi, Julia Fox, Bowen Yang and Emma Stone (who also serves as government producer) — but just when you assume you have gotten a maintain of what ”Fantasmas” is, it slips appropriate by means of your fingers yet again, trailing off in a new, unpredicted course.
Inside of the first number of minutes of the pilot, Torres climbs into a rideshare and gets to be absorbed by the sitcom enjoying on the again-seat Television. We have barely gotten to know his character in advance of we’re sucked into a montage of “MELF” episodes, looking at Paul Dano grapple with his feelings for an ”Alf”-like muppet, which is tearing aside his relatives in the system.
So how does a person go about selling a clearly show like this?
“I indicate, you kind of really don’t,” Torres admits. “By the time I was pitching it, I had presently performed [comedy special] ‘My Beloved Shapes’ with HBO, and was functioning on ‘Los Espookys,’ so they currently experienced a feeling of who I was as a writer, and they largely went off of that.”
It’s been a large calendar year for Torres — in addition to ”Fantasmas,” ”Problemista” premiered in March. The 37-yr-old states the launch of these jobs becoming only a couple months aside was not precisely how he’d envisioned matters. Involving the pandemic and previous year’s Hollywood strikes, his initiatives have existed in a in close proximity to-consistent condition of flux. In a two-calendar year period of time, even though waiting to movie Year 2 of ”Los Espookys,” he completed the scripts for ”Fantasmas” and wrote and directed ”Problemista,” which was at first set to premiere in August 2023. It was not perfect, but Torres certain himself that factors would perform out for the most effective.
“I think I’m relentlessly optimistic,” he said. “That’s my way of inclined a little something to be superior.”
It’s a trait he claims he inherited from his mom.
“She absolutely believes in symptoms and omens, but almost everything is a fantastic sign,” he states. “There’s never ever, ever been a lousy one.”
That outlook has seeped into Torres’ do the job. It’s not to say that he hardly ever dives into the darkness — ”Problemista” finds humor in the stressful and complicated expertise of striving to safe a perform visa to continue to be in the United States — but his function is never ever eaten by it. The very same goes for the characters he writes.
“‘Fantasmas’ is quite empathetic towards anyone who’s onscreen,” he claimed. “The figures are the sort of people today you bump into that you might in no way see once more but they built an effects on your lifetime.”
In any other generation, Torres’ characters would be extras or track record actors men and women who occupy the display for a handful of fleeting times but who are not ordinarily presented the luxury or place to have a loaded, inner existence. “As an obsessive particular person, I have been noticing that I compose about pretty obsessive people today,” he explained. “People who can’t permit go of this a single detail.”
”Fantasmas” is complete of these people: a trainer obsessed with psychoanalyzing her student’s doodles, just one of Santa’s disgruntled elves and a wellness insurance policies rep deeply committed to upholding her company’s policies. As a director, Torres gravitates towards mates and former collaborators, as properly as actors who have anything to give that audiences could not have viewed but.
It is what designed his most well-liked ”Saturday Evening Live” sketches so fun to look at, as he teamed up with Stone in a bit about an actress engrossed in the pretty modest element she has in a gay porn, or Ryan Gosling as a male obsessed with “Avatar’s“ font option of Papyrus.
“The way Ryan just desires to be absolutely free,” Torres explained with a laugh. “I enjoy doing the job with persons who have that kind of electrical power you can come to feel as a result of the display screen.”
“Fantasmas” was his option to reunite with Stone and function with a would like list of performers, such as Alexa Demie, Ziwe and Dominique Jackson (“She’s so potent but also so relaxing. It is virtually like she has the vitality of a spiritual leader.”) It also marked his initial time performing with performance artist Martine Gutierrez, who plays Torres’ agent, Vanesja. Onscreen, she’s a super large who turns the comedy into a campy cleaning soap opera each individual time she seems.
“One of the early references for her was a character from [Mexican telenovela] ‘La Usurpadora,’” Torres mentioned. “There’s a undesirable twin who has this fierce bob. I despatched Martine a clip, and I sense like she took a little bit of it and produced a total Almodóvar-esque heroine.”
That ingredient of collaboration is a little something he claims he skipped from his time functioning on “SNL.” Returning to the quick-variety framework gave him additional adaptability to delve into figures that he could decide up and discard on a whim. “They’re like Sims,” he added.
But it also presented him with new worries. Like a sketch display, “Fantasmas” required additional sets and costumes than the ordinary sitcom generation.
“We had conferences that ended up like, ‘The quantities are not introducing up,’” he stated. “I got an electronic mail like, ‘Well, this set can no for a longer period have partitions.’ I requested if it however had a floor, and when they explained, ‘No,’ that is when you just have to get in touch with wardrobe and be like, ‘OK, these clothing have to shine. The wig has to glow,’ since there is practically nothing else.”
It was annoying, guaranteed, but it ultimately hardly ever felt like a drag. Torres surrounds himself with persons who are just as scrappy and imaginative as he is, and he operates from the perception that his function must be exciting for all people.
“I fundamentally disagree with the idea that in buy to make some thing fantastic, you require to be overworked and miserable,” he explained. “It’s a quite American factor to glamorize tough do the job. Folks nevertheless see ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and feel, ‘Oh, I want a task that treats me like s—,’ and I just consider ‘Why?’”
In a Tv set landscape with so couple of Latino showrunners and dismal illustration, that Torres has the space to build jobs as supremely unusual and indulgent as “Fantasmas” feels like a thing of a miracle.
Even inside the realm of “Latino Television,” Torres exists in his very own lane. He creates tales that are obviously formed by his experiences but are not concerned with currently being universal. He’s consistently introducing to the cultural landscape as a substitute of adhering to tips and tropes we’ve previously viewed.
“I’m not attempting to produce a single of those minor guides by the dollars sign up: the ‘What Is Latinidad?’, ‘What Is Queer?’ tender-address booklets,” he stated. “I’m not preoccupied with making a thesis statement for a more substantial group. This is just lifestyle as I see it, and how I truly feel it.”
At the time he’s concluded a task, Torres is just eager to have it out in the planet. And although there may possibly be outsize tension for writers of shade to carry out well, he claims the numbers are none of his small business.
“It’s like, ‘Honey, I offered you the cake. Now you’re gonna call me from the birthday get together to notify me if the people like it?’” he claims. “‘Just serve the cake and leave me out of it, simply because I experienced a blast producing it.’”
