Los Espookys, you know Julio Torres.On the other hand, if you are a long-time Saturday Night Live fan, you know the gay writer/director/actor penned the much loved sketch “Papyrus,” for which Ryan Gosling recently asked Torres to write a sequel. Torres was a writer on SNL from 2016-2019.Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.One of the bigger moves and most personal in Torres’ career is his directorial feature debut, Problemista, which was released earlier this year by A24. The film also stars Torres as Alejandro, an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador (where Torres was born) who has to navigate the horrendously broken U.S.
immigration system after his work visa runs out. He turns to Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), an erratic art critic, who offers to sponsor Alejandro if he can help her curate an art show of her cryogenically frozen husband’s egg paintings. As working for Elizabeth becomes its own nightmare, Alejandro dreams feel further and further away.Torres bringing his fantastical, shape-obsessed viewpoint to something so personal to him, and by proxy incredibly political, on first glance doesn’t seem like it should be a fit.
Turns out it’s a natural one. The 37-year-old tells Alejandro’s tale through the lens of fairytale, making Swinton’s Elizabeth into a hydra, the immigration system a haunted maze full of sudden stops and starts. Torres said he knew he wanted to tell this story based on his own experiences, but it never really clicked for him until he envisioned CraigsList as a monster in the vein of Ursula from The Little Mermaid (played by comedian Larry Owens).
This allowed him to dive into Alejandro’s story. “This movie’s very personal, and so I wasn’t thinking about any sort of political statement. I was just expressing emotion and expressing the heart and emotional ecosystem of this specific character.
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Julio Torres