Tilda Swinton is the voice of water in a toilet bowl. Emma Stone plays an earnest extra in a low-budget porno. Paul Dano stars as a sitcom dad having an affair with a fluffy purple alien. Ryan Gosling embodies a man driven to insanity by the Papyrus font of the Avatar logo. Steve Buscemiis the letter Q. If anyone can get a big-name star to do something weird for the camera, it’s Julio Torres.
In his capacity as an actor-writer-director, Torres, who is 38 and grew up in El Salvador, has welcomed many a star into his Julio-verse, casting them in his surreal skits on Saturday Night Live and in his leftfield TV shows Los Espookys and Fantasmas. But actors aren’t the only ones taken with his fantastical worlds, most of which exist somewhere at the intersection of Williamsburg and a fever dream; one TV critic called Torres “a beacon of hope for TV’s future”.
