“White, thin and gorgeous!”
Julio Torres blurts this out as he cuts up a vegan burrito with a fork and knife, then bursts into a laugh long and loud enough to be heard by anyone walking past this East Village café’s open doors. We’ve been discussing the lead actress of a movie that premiered earlier this year, and he’s gushing about how smart he found the film and her performance when he makes the remark. “Isn’t it funny how far we’ve swung back? Like, wow, those three years were so hard. Suddenly, the nominees for everything, all the
lists, everyone.”
Like all American industries, Hollywood has seen a switchback on the pushes for diversity and inclusion that began in 2020. Of course, Donald Trump’s reelection has a lot to do with that, but Torres is hesitant to name the president as the only cause, saying, “I think we’re rushing to mask something instead of fixing it.” The move back toward “white, thin and gorgeous” is a symptom of one of Torres’ sworn rivals: American bureaucracy, and the suppression of marginalized people and ideas that come with it.
But that’s not the vernacular he uses for his fight. Instead, he’s got “Color Theories.” At Performance Space New York, beginning on Sept. 3, Torres will bring audiences further into the surreal universe he’s built across projects like his 2024 HBO series “Fantasmas,” his 2023 film “Problemista” and especially his 2019 comedy special “My Favorite Shapes,” which saw him narrate the deeper meanings he found in everything from ’90s Happy Meal toys to the capital letter E. This time around, he takes people through the colors he associates with the world around him. Navy blue, for example, is the color of superheroes — or as he calls them, supercops.
“I’m using color as a way of explaining things that we’ve all observed before,” he says. “That trope where a director gives an actor a note, like ‘Be more purple, or orange,’ I get that. So this feels like a way of explaining myself.”
Julio Torres draws on an easel during a rehearsal for “Color Theories”
Andrew Patino
Everything, spiritually, has a color in Torres’ world. What about “Color Theories” itself?
That’s a conceit he takes rather seriously. “The show is quite purple,” he says. “It’s about anger within a bureaucratic system. The anger and frustration are red, and the bureaucratic system is blue, so combined, they’re purple — which was a title idea I had for ‘Problemista’ at one point.” Though the film ultimately took its name from a Spanish word for “troublemaker,” he starred in it as an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador desperate to find someone to sponsor his work visa and help keep him in New York — a purple tension if there ever was one.
By some miracle, Torres, who frequently embraces the term “alien” as both his immigration status and his way of being in the world, says he “never got a note to be more normal” from the executives who champion his work.
“I think it’s because I didn’t put myself on the track of emulating something that exists already. If you decide you want to write a recognizable romantic comedy, the notes you get will push you closer to what a successful version of that is,” he says. But there’s no preexisting “successful version” of a Julio Torres project besides the ones he’s made himself.
His ability to frame complete opuses around toys, colors and shapes has proven Torres to be a factory for sophisticated takes on childlike concepts, a skill that could make him invaluable to the Hollywood content machine. “They’ve asked, ‘Do you have ideas for XYZ?’ Since ‘Barbie,’ a lot of toy franchises [have reached out], and I do earnestly think about it,” he says. He takes a long pause, seeming almost to reconsider one of those offers as we speak. “But I never do it!” he says, erupting into another 10-second-long giggle.
Torres claims that he hasn’t completely sworn off the mainstream. “Maybe one day,” he muses, there might be a way to take on an IP project and make it his own. “When I think of Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ movies, I think of them as Tim Burton movies, not the studio’s.” Then, his inner problemista peeking out, he veers off into a tangent, cackling: “Will they bring them back now? Are we gonna get Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito? A Catwoman cinematic universe with Halle Berry and a hologram of Eartha Kitt?”
When I ask which color that we haven’t yet discussed is most essential to know about, he says, “Beige. Beige is what Hollywood has been pushing.” He’s lowered his voice as though telling a secret, but by the end of his explanation — “Big eyes. Little mouth. Microscopic nose” — we’re both laughing so hard we can barely breathe.
It’s clear that, if Torres is ever going to make a “Barbie” or “Batman,” now isn’t the time. His dinner break is over, and we’re walking to the theater for a tech rehearsal, where he’ll keep spouting off about orange and yellow until 10 p.m. In “Color Theories,” the noses are big. The ideas are alien. And the people are purple.
