Comedian-writer-actor-director Julio Torres has created some of the most visually identifiable comedies of the past five years. It began with his HBO stand-up special, My Favorite Shapes, intensified with Los Espookys and his movie Problemista, and most recently culminated in his show Fantasmas. Torres’s creations are full of fantastical set pieces, but the worlds somehow remain both grounded and tactile. His new project brings him back to stand-up — he is currently working on a show called Color Theories, based around the lives of various members of the rainbow. The show is a work in progress, but even just the idea makes sense within Torres’s larger worldview. Still, despite the strength of his artistic through-line, when taken together, it’s clear that an evolution has taken place.
Torres’s earliest filmed works, including My Favorite Shapes and the sketches from his time as a writer on Saturday Night Live, tend toward the pale. They’re translucent and shiny — with the sets, props, and cinematography built to either accept or reflect light while remaining devoid of a rainbow. But his newer works have been laden with bright pops: Tilda Swinton’s bright-red hair in Problemista and Emma Stone’s and Cole Escola’s vibrant Real Housewives dresses in Fantasmas. In the midst of Color Theories, which first toured throughout the fall, Torres told Vulture Fest about his relationship with the colors in his world, both in real life and in his work. What’s black and white and read all over? This Q&A, found below.
What is your first color memory?
Can I rephrase the question?
However you want.
What is the first color that made an impression on me? That is a beautiful question. Thank you for asking that question in that way.
Two colors come to mind. One, I had a T-shirt that was purple that my mother painted a little silver train on. Another color that I remember was my Barbie’s dress. We made her a sort of risqué, translucent, red little number and pasties. She was very empowered.
What stood out to you about the T-shirt and the dress?
They were very deliberate. They were very non-passive colors. They are both connected to something that I explored in Problemista: my lifelong visual collaborations with my mom. In the movie, the character based on my mom makes this giant insane play set, which I didn’t have, but would have been nice! This set was designed by my real mother. She’s an architect by trade, and she’s always been a designer. She makes the clothes that she wears. She used to make the clothes that I wore, the furniture in our house. There was always this exploration of affection through creation that was very, very informative, and I still see it that way. When I meet someone who I really like, I want to make something with them. Sometimes my brain doesn’t compute when I meet someone who I really like who’s a lawyer. I’m like, Okay, so I can’t put you in a movie … but I love collaborating, and that comes from her.
When you were first doing open mics, then professional stand-up, in New York, the only thing you had control over was what you were wearing and what tone that sets. How did you dress?
I started doing stand-up during the time period that I based Problemista on. I was figuring myself out and trying to find solid ground, and trying to stay here in the U.S. and going through bureaucratic hurdles. At that time — this is not in the movie — I decided that I should only wear black. The way I phrased it to my friends was “I haven’t earned color yet. If I start wearing color, I’ll just be coasting.” It felt like using a credit card when I don’t have enough money.
How do you think that affected audiences’ perception of you?
I don’t think it did, actually. I don’t think that people thought much about it. It is New York, you know?
Many people wear black.
Many people wear black. If you’re doing open mics, you might be a server somewhere, in which case you have to wear black.
What color was your hair at the time?
My natural hair, which is black. I was this utilitarian little robot. That’s when I started being vegan, which I still am. And it wasn’t until I got a work visa to stay, and the stand-up thing was starting to go somewhere, that I decided, Okay, now I’m just gonna do white. I’m done absorbing. Now I want to reflect. Then, I bleached my hair to almost white.
I think of an early Julio line as “my favorite color is clear.”
White was the gateway to silvers and clears and shiny.
In 2019, you wrote “The Actress” at Saturday Night Live, and the color scheme is blown out and overexposed. Why was that the palette?
I only ever wrote at SNL, but it’s where I shadowed directors. I worked almost exclusively with Dave McCary, who ended up producing Problemista along with Emma Stone. He was excited to work with me because I was a visual writer. He was very gracious in always keeping me in the loop with hair, wardrobe, all these things that are not your priority if you’re a different kind of writer. I was a very visual kid, and I thought writing film and TV would mean abandoning the visual side of me. And then it was: Oh, wait, directing is a way of marrying the two. Color would always be a conversation between all departments going through every sketch.
This sketch is an anomaly in that Dave did not direct it; this was Oz Rodriguez. The premise is that Emma plays a very emotionally raw actress who feels deeply for all her characters. And the gig she gets is the woman who gets cheated on in a gay porn who says, “What are you doing? I’m divorcing you!” and then she walks away while the men keep having sex. In the sketch, she keeps trying to find her footing as her character. She gives her a name, Dierdre, and she keeps adding lines. And here, she gets teary-eyed catching her husband and godson, and she says, “I forgive you.”
In terms of the color, it’s very sad, right? Because we’re seeing the world through her eyes. I love finding actors who are not mannequins. Emma is so intentional, and it’s like, the conversations about what are going to be her little sweaters, her little jewelry.
The “bronde” wig has always really stood out to me.
Because it’s this mousy hair that you see a lot of people have, but film and TV is very allergic to, because it’s not a definitive color. TV likes brunettes, blondes, and redheads, right? Because that’s a way of quickly defining a character. This is so real and you can imagine that she did her hair. There’s something very sad about her.
That same year, you released My Favorite Shapes. I think of that as the pinnacle of your “shiny” era.
I was getting used to this idea of being seen and being “in the spotlight.” So I was like, Oh, that means I should be shiny. I needed to command some kind of showmanship. Like Cher. Michael Jackson. Elton John.
Did that show feel like a culmination to you?
It almost felt like the thesis of that first chapter.
This is the first time we saw you with dyed hair. Is there a line between what you’re interested in artistically and how you are physically?
Oh, no. They’re pretty synonymous. I had a lot of clear furniture at the time. There’s no off-duty me.
Then, in Los Espookys, blues and greens come up a lot. Your hair went bright blue.
Los Espookys was a live-action cartoon, and every character is a little Halloween costume of themselves. All the characters were going to be pretty goth-y, but then I thought, What would that mean for the kind of character I would like to create and play? The contrast between a punky blue, and vampirelike clothes felt like the flavor of goth I wanted to present. He’s sort of princely, but there’s an edge to him. I had a hard time sometimes wrapping my mind around what he wore, because I felt it was kind of tacky. But then I was like, Oh, it’s fine if he’s kind of tacky in a sort of rich, WeHo, gay kind of way. What happens when someone is very rich and no one says “no” to them? They buy Gucci loafers.
During development, what were the visual ideas that you knew you wanted in the show?
The seed of the idea for the show, which Fred Armisen had sold to HBO, was “horror makeup artists in Mexico City.” He asked my friend Ana Fabrega and me if we wanted to write it with him and be in it, which was an insane gift to suddenly receive. Ana and I aren’t really drawn to gore. We’re more drawn to this campy, mystery, Death Becomes Her aesthetic. It became theatrical and campy and a sandbox for us to play with ideas. That’s the thing about making work that is not that expensive — the stakes are so much lower, so everyone just leaves you alone.
Where did you feel like your relationship to iridescence was at that time?
I did not see Los Espookys as my show. I saw it as Ana’s, Fred’s, and my little sandcastle that we were building together. So we brought in our interests and we plugged them into this world that we had created. I didn’t really bring in my artistic agenda. Those are clothes I would never wear, and that’s a room that I would never feel comfortable in, because it’s just so yucky, right? It felt freeing to inhabit spaces that I would really not like to be in.
What was freeing about that?
That this wasn’t me presenting, “This is what I think is beautiful,” but more like “LOL, imagine if somebody slept here,” right? Los Espookys is me discovering what acting is.
In 2023, you directed, wrote, and starred in Problemista. What were the defining colors to you for that movie?
I almost think of Problemista as a live-action anime. One of the first things that I knew about the movie was that I wanted to move about the city and for the music to be like dun-dun-dun-dun … This was the first thing I directed, but the DP of the movie, Fredrik, is a wonderful, wonderful person. He’s done The Square and Triangle of Sadness, and his lens is a little cold, which I liked. I kept telling him that we should see the world through the eyes of my character, who’s like a little bird catching glimpses of things that are shiny. I actually went to Gothenburg, Sweden, to work on the color correction in person.
What were you trying to amp up?
The shiny quality. We kept sitting together and we’d talk. I’m like, “More shiny. More shiny.”
What does “more shiny” mean?
Oh, it’s beautiful. That means that he freeze-frames, he takes his little tool, he hovers over a part of the image, and then he amps the shine. We did that to my eyes in that scene.
When I saw her for the first time, I said “I want to convey that this is sort of ‘love at first sight.’ Can we make my eyes sparkle when I see her?” So we do. The sparkle goes up and then down when he sees her. One of the many, many, many titles that I thought about for this movie was Purple, because she’s in red and he’s in blue, but no one would have gotten it. Alejandro wears a lot of blue because he’s desperately trying to project order. He’s desperately trying to project that “I got my act together.” And she’s wearing red because she’s danger, she’s the predator.
Can we talk about Tilda Swinton’s shade of red hair?
Truly one of the biggest joys of my work has been the long discussions with Tilda about this woman’s hairstyle.
Is the red meant to be her character’s natural hair color?
No, no. The backstory that we made for her was that she went to the hair salon and asked for a hairstyle that is in constant conflict with her hair texture. She yelled and threw a tantrum, and they gave her that cut and they gave her a bunch of products that she never once used again. And she has the shade of red that you see in the wild a lot but that no one intends to get. No one wants to be a burgundy red.
When she gets stressed, she’s adjusting her bangs [mimes the movement], and in her mind, she’s saying, like, “Fucking, fucking hairdresser! She fucked it!” So it’s very manic.
We talked about hair a lot. It was one of the first collaborative conversations we had. She has the tunnel of hair, which to us was great because it evoked the themes of a monster in a cave, which we explore in the movie, and these bangs are like little stalagmites. The color and the silhouettes of her clothes were inspired by medieval dragons.
There’s scales on that coat that we saw.
She’s very reptilian.
Fantasmas, meanwhile, feels totally unbound by color.
In Problemista, it’s someone from the outside desperately trying to be on the inside — squeezing himself into the narrow opening in a world that he wants to be in. He’s very wide-eyed and very optimistic, and he has a very can-do attitude.
He literally has shiny eyes.
There’s a very deer-in-headlights resilience, which is definitely a part of me. Fantasmas is the other side of the coin of someone who has access to all the colors, but realizes that that feels suffocating somehow. Something weird happened with what I was doing and I started evoking a lot of Tilda’s character in mine. I became the disheveled, bitter artist who is fussy and always carrying junk with him and has an assistant played by a robot in the show that isn’t blue, like Alé. He’s a very disordered, disorganized, cacophonous version of me, which I’ve been leaning into, honestly! I can’t wait to be a senile curmudgeon artist. I feel like I will wear that very well.
Here’s a gorgeous shot from Fantasma, but it’s a little overwhelming. Throughout the show, you’re overwhelmed by bureaucracy in a lot of ways.
There’s a lot of black in the show and there’s a lot of voids. Problemista was shiny, Fantasmas was glowy. I think Problemista is very crisp and very in focus. Fantasmas was a little lost in terms of focus, because it’s trying to evoke ideas of ghostliness and loneliness and isolation.
Is there a color or an aesthetic principle that ties all of the Fantasmas sketches together?
They’re all glowy and ghostly, and there’s a sort of melancholic quality to them. They feel hazy, like they’re dreams or something. The trick was going into all these different worlds but not feeling like it was cut and pasted together, but that it actually flowed. And, obviously, color and the cinematography was a big part of that.
Okay. I do want to get to Color Theories. You’re currently touring it. How did you come to the idea of wanting to talk about color as your next project?
I never set out to be like, “Oh, my next thing should be about this.” It’s always like, “I’ve always been thinking about this, and the common denominator is this, so I guess it’s about that.”
Makes sense to me.
I’m hesitant to talk too much about it because I don’t know what the show will be. It’s such a work in progress, such a work in progress. It’s seeds of ideas and thoughts on colors, and I’m seeing where, if anywhere, that goes.
What do you wear to talk about colors?
I know, yeah.
I see I’ve hit a nerve!
No, no. I haven’t reached the perfect answer to that question because I don’t want to be biased. If I’m saying “And red is like____” and I’m wearing red, then I’m telegraphing that you should read me as that. I think I’m just gonna find all-black clothes, which is a very imperfect answer to that question. There’s a lot I don’t know.
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