Julio Torres, the wildly original new voice of film and TV comedy

I’ve only been speaking to Julio Torres for a few minutes when he decides he needs to show me something. He walks across his New York apartment, awkwardly carrying the iPad conducting our video call, but almost immediately gets distracted by a large robot-shaped balloon, which he tells me he bought for his boyfriend’s birthday. Now semi-deflated, it hangs melancholically in the middle of the room. “The other night I woke up and looked up and he was watching me sleep,” he says, his boyish face deadly serious. So what did he do? “I just put him in the bathroom. Then I came back later and he was still there, looking in the mirror.”

I’d been planning to ask Torres how closely his surreal, original comedies mirror his own internal life, but the question no longer seems worth asking. At 37, he is one of the most distinctive new voices in comedy, having worked on long-standing US sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, creating his own HBO series and attracting collaborators from Emma Stone to Steve Buscemi to Julia Fox.

His is a comic imagination in which any inanimate object might have a rich internal life and any quotidian situation could lurch dizzyingly into fantasy at a moment’s notice. To watch his work is to spend time tumbling in the psychedelic washing machine of his mind, where mermaids work in call centres and hamsters go to gay clubs, yet rent is still unaffordable and immigration status impossible to settle.

Torres’s latest works are Problemista, an A24-produced film co-starring Tilda Swinton, and Fantasmas, a six-part comedy sketch series for HBO, which launched earlier this month. Torres created, wrote, directed and stars in both. But 12 years ago he was a new arrival in New York from El Salvador, struggling to secure a work visa.

His debut feature film, Problemista, is a fictionalised version of that period. “In 2012 I spent a summer rushing to get a visa sponsor, and sort of discovering myself in the process,” he says. When he obtained the permit, it fittingly deemed him an “alien of extraordinary ability”. In the film, his character, the Salvadorean Alejandro, longs to make toys for Hasbro, although his ideas are a little strange, such as Cabbage Patch Kids with smartphones that send them anxiety-inducing notifications, or a Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her back. In order to apply for the job, he needs to be based in the US. To stay there, he needs an employer to sponsor him.

Enter eccentric art critic Elizabeth, who needs someone to catalogue the work of her artist husband (RZA of Wu-Tang Clan). Elizabeth is played with volcanic energy by Swinton, who brings shoulder pads, a neglected magenta dye job and a near-psychotic level of entitlement to every scene.

The film occasionally slides into fantastical sequences reminiscent of Michel Gondry or Charlie Kaufman. These often riff on one of Torres’s abiding preoccupations: being at the mercy of the nonsensical and dehumanising policies of large, faceless institutions and companies. “I feel trapped in it,” he says. “I resent it, and I went from feeling that I couldn’t possibly live in it to resenting the fact that I have to try to live in it.” This space of resigned compromise is where his characters often end their stories.

His ability to find the magic in any situation might be a family trait. On a visit to the US, his grandmother was told by a palm reader that one of her descendants would become famous in New York. His mother, an architect and fashion designer with whom he collaborates frequently, believes he is the fulfilment of that prediction.

After moving to New York and obtaining a literature degree, Torres got into comedy writing. He co-created, wrote and starred in the smart Spanish-language HBO comedy Los Espookys and worked for three years as a writer on Saturday Night Live. There he became known for some of the show’s most surreal moments, such as the “Wells for Boys” sketch, a fake Fisher-Price ad for a plastic well beside which introspective kids can ruminate.

His fondness for sketch comedy led him to create Fantasmas, which is equal parts queer fantasia and dystopian nightmare. Here, Torres plays a version of himself who loses an earring in a club and embarks on a journey across New York to get it back. He is accompanied by his agent Vanesja (the “j” is silent), played with old-Hollywood seductiveness by visual artist Martine Gutierrez, and the unhelpful robot assistant Bibo, whose role, Torres points out, has now been reprised by the balloon haunting his bathroom.

One memorable scene shows a desperate Torres pitching film ideas to a cynical movie exec played by Natasha Lyonne. He knows she wants him to tokenise his queer, Hispanic identity, so with a heavy heart he pitches her a film called How I Came Out to My Abuela.

The real Torres argues that there is a need not only to give people from minority groups acting or directing roles, but also to allow them “to do it in a way that feels true to them, not in a way that will package their experience for the most capital gains”.

“I hate the idea that representation is a sign of goodness in a company,” he continues. “Let’s not kid ourselves, companies and corporations only do things if they believe it’ll be in their best financial interest. Right now they’ve made the calculation that being inclusive of queer people is financially smart for them, and that’s the only reason they’re doing it.”

Fantasmas takes Torres all over New York, which is curiously presented as if on a stage set, with half-constructed spaces and obvious scaffolding. “I aim to show things as they feel, rather than as they ‘are’,” he says, providing air quotes. “[In movies] there’s an allergy to imperfection, ambiguity and messiness — things which I love. To me, New York City is the scaffolding. It’s the garbage . . . That’s what I’m interested in.”

After recounting a few tales of jewellery he has lost and found over the years, Torres shows me an arm cuff made for him recently by a friend. It is gold-coloured; along its length are sculpted the facial features of some of his collaborators: his mother’s eyes, the nose of comedian Spike Einbinder, the lips of Gutierrez, Swinton’s eyes. As an object, it feels as though it shouldn’t work. It’s too whimsical, somewhat grotesque, intimate in a way that feels slightly uncomfortable. Yet it is, as Torres presents it, utterly charming.

‘Problemista’ is released on digital platforms in the UK on July 8. ‘Fantasmas’ is on Max in the US now