'I metabolise things through humour a lot. It's my nature'

Julio Torres is behind some of the best ‘SNL’ skits in recent memory. He tells Annabel Nugent about his lack of interest in going mainstream, and his latest show, ‘Color Theories’

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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 Buscemi is 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”.

The man I meet for lunch is more low-key than such a grand proclamation might suggest. He’s quick to laugh and chilled out, wearing a shirt printed with the kind of fanciful scene you might find in one of his shows: penguins eating ice cream outside a neo-Classical building. Around his neck is a robot pendant. His hair is spiky, and over the years has functioned like an emotional thermometer: blond, black, blue, platinum. Currently, it’s a shade of red that’s hard to pin down.

Like his hair, Torres’s work tends to evade description: stories so strange and slippery that words slide right off them with nothing to grab onto. It’s why, when describing his new play, Color Theories at Soho Theatre, he can only smile and say: “It’s a show about colours. Dot. Dot. Dot.” ‘Color Theories’ (pictured) is the spiritual successor to Torres’s 2019 HBO special ‘My Favorite Shapes’ (Joe Caster)