When done right, few gambits are funnier than an actor skewering the perceived shallowness of fellow actors. Sure, it’s a little overdone, but there are always tricks one can use to make the gambit feel fresh. Take, for instance, Julio Torres’s masterful HBO comedy Fantasmas, which chose this week to debut Dylan O’Brien as an actor who undergoes an existential crisis while wearing his agent’s red lingerie set.
As with most of the ingeniously ridiculous scenes in Fantasmas, O’Brien’s lacy rant against the world’s rampant inequality comes basically out of nowhere. One minute, his agent, Vanesja (Martine Gutierrez) is helping out Torres’s wayward protagonist, also named Julio, and the next, she’s taking a call from O’Brien’s character, Dustin, who will be displeased to know that his TV series, Cunty Little Rich Kids: School of Magic, has decided to use the promo photo he did not like. To make matters worse, the airline lost his luggage—so he’ll have to borrow Vanesja’s clothes for some reason, instead of just wearing whatever he already has on.
From the moment we cut to Dustin’s hotel room, where he struts out to the bed in Vanesja’s underwear set, the farcical absurdity is practically oozing out of the wallpaper.
