Every actor has a wheelhouse of four or five personality types that inherently work with their format. Playing the fool is one of them for me. I think of Justin as a golden retriever character.

TESS POLLOK: You’re an actor and working artist, I could also say comedian going off Instagram content. I’m so glad to be sitting down with you today because our readers are obsessed with your character in Magic Farm. He’s basically the gooey soup dumpling of the film. I just saw it last night, too, so it’s all fresh. How did you decide to work with Amalia Ulman?

JOE APOLLONIO: It was really crazy and random. Casting for Magic Farm started in late 2020, which was a time when I was extremely active online and making a lot of videos. My friend Anthony Valdex, who’s the editor of El Planeta, contacted me and was, like, “Hey, I have this friend Amalia who really wants to meet you.” I think she was still living in LA at the time so we did it over Zoom, and she basically told me everything about her process and where she was at–that El Planeta was going to Sundance, that she was writing her sophomore film, and that she was conceptualizing and looking for people who were talented and funny to help her realize the project. I kind of live under a rock and I didn’t know who Amalia was at the time. But when I did my research into her work, I was instantly, like, this is a really fucking cool filmmaker. So I’ve been attached to Magic Farm since the very beginning.

POLLOK: What about Amalia’s work made you so excited to collaborate with her?

APOLLONIO: The fact that she comes from a fine art background–it makes her visions of what to make in a cinematic context subversive and so fucking cool. Also I think at time I was just so happy to work with and befriend someone who really liked me and believed in me and wanted to help me push forward in my career. That was new for me. I love her so very much.

Joe Apollonio on the set of Magic Farm

POLLOK: Had you acted at all before Magic Farm?

APOLLONIO: No! It’s interesting because I had been pursuing it and striking out a lot. I had one line on a TV show before this and that was it. Weirdly, in between her reaching out to me and Magic Farm, I actually did start working as an actor, so there was a lot of serendipity to it.

POLLOK: Do you think of acting as your craft now?

APOLLONIO: I would definitely say I’m more of an actor than a comedian. I think that I can be funny but the stuff that I write, for example the show I did at Joe’s Pub two years ago, tends to be more character-driven monologues, and then the character happens to be funny.

POLLOK: It’s funny because I grew up in Hollywood and I always hated actors as a child. I was very self-serious back then. But I’ve done a 180 on that as I’ve gotten older, because actors actually feel really alive when you spend time with them and have so much vitality.

APOLLONIO: I was just talking about this with my girlfriend today. It really depends on the actor - who they are as a person in their day to day lives. I think many actors are very sincere people. That what makes them able to live fictional worlds authentically as possible. People who pursue acting for the wrong reasons, they’re the ones who are might be annoying and fake. But who am I to judge anyone, I wear aviator sunglasses.

POLLOK: Honesty is integral to being a great artist. Not even honesty on the screen, but just honesty with yourself about who you are and what you want. It’s life’s greatest failsafe. Even actors who are honest with themselves that they just love attention are awesome.

APOLLONIO: I feel that way. Having expectations can kill you. I try to always be honest with myself and I think a huge part of that for my life is letting go of expectations. Shit pops off as soon as I don’t expect anything anymore, but then I get fooled into having expectations again and get fucked up mentally. Magic Farm is obviously the most significant point of my career so far and it would be easy to start expecting things to come after that, you know? But that’s something I try to avoid.

POLLOK: We did a great interview with Betsey Brown about her film Actors and she talked about how it’s basically an anti-expectations movie. Before she made Actors, she had a lot of expectations about how her career was going to go based on X, Y, and Z roles that she had already done, and her expectations were just completely misplaced. So Actors ended up being a liberating project for her because it was her chance to do whatever she wanted. There’s a quote that I love about being an artist, we’ve done so much with so little for so long we can do anything with nothing now. No one knows exactly where it came from, maybe the army. But I think it really applies to being a working artist.

Scene from Magic Farm

APOLLONIO: I think I’m happiest when I’m making my own things, or skateboarding. To this day, that’s the one thing that quiets my mind down the best and keeps me focused on small but everlasting moments. Just being with my friends in the sunshine is really wonderful. I used to think it was sex, but now I need love, too.

POLLOK: I’m so on your wavelength with that. I was a big sex haver but as I got older I realized it’s all about love. But let’s refocus on Magic Farm, how did you find love and everlasting joy in that project? Is it better than sex? [Laughs]

APOLLONIO: Totally. I think it’s a breath of fresh air in relation to a lot of the movies that are coming out today. I’ve always looked up to actors like Michael Pitt, actors who did a lot of cool indie flicks in the 2000s, remember? Magic Farm reminds me of a movie I would have watched during that era. It makes me feel inspired by the notion of being an artist and being what I want to be in life.

POLLOK: I think the editing really works in the service of that effect. When I watched it and I saw that Eugene Kotlyarenko was a producer I started to connect the dots there. It’s very similar to what he does in his post-internet films. Sometimes filmmakers can hit that tip a little too hard and it can feel very digital or glitchy in a way that actually takes away from the film, but I felt the opposite of that watching Magic Farm. I liked that Amalia didn’t lean on that as a crutch. As a device, it totally served the characters and I thought it worked to highlight the absurdity of these two totally different tribes of people interacting.

Scene from Magic Farm

APOLLONIO: I knew it was going to be great just from hanging out with Amalia before production even started. She has such a great instinct to subvert the visual medium. Another thing I love about the film is the Argentinian cast. I thought the people she picked just gave it such a great dimension.

POLLOK: You’ve mentioned that you have a single mom and that she’s a huge influence on your life and work. What was that like for you, growing up? Do you think it affects your mindset now?

APOLLONIO: My mom is the most eccentric person I’ll ever know. And it was just me and her growing up pretty much. She’s had a hard life and I don’t think she realizes how magnetic and cool she is. Our relationship is special and unorthodox - we probably lack the boundaries most families have. So for me it’s something worth exploring with my writing until I have nothing more to say about it.

POLLOK: How did you approach building your character? He’s funny, he’s the least asshole-ish of the whole group. He reminded me of goopy, cuddly guys I know.

APOLLONIO: I gave Amalia a lot of my backstory as an actual person, that was fun. I’m queer and I was in a relationship with a much older man for a while. I talked to her about that stuff. But I don’t think I exhibited, like, a tangible technique on set. I just kept myself on alert because suddenly all these people I’d admired for such a long time were my co-stars. So I kept myself in this mentality where I was just saying to myself, basically, “All you’ve got to do right now is just make every scene count.” And that’s what I did. I just listened to what the people around me were saying and doing and reacted as honestly as I possibly could. I was totally freaked out the entire time about doing a terrible job.

POLLOK: That makes sense. I sometimes find that I do my best work just by going on instinct. It’s a sink-or-swim thing.

APOLLONIO: Justin is probably the closest portrayal of my actual self that I’ll ever do in a project. Sometimes that’s even harder than playing someone who’s vastly different from you. I think that Justin is way less cynical than I am in real life, so, with the character, I ended up inadvertently creating this version of myself that was a very…naive, almost dim sort of version of me.

POLLOK: You’re cynical in real life?

APOLLONIO: I can be goofy but yeah. We’re all multi-faceted. I think I’m probably a bit more dark than people would expect. I think Justin is the goofy part of my personality, just concentrated. I remember reading some of the reviews–because, you know, I’m vain–and one of them talked about his “startling dimness” and said he had a “dimness that was almost pure.” I think of him as a golden retriever character. It was funny to read that because I was, like, “Whoa, I didn’t even know I was going for that.” Pure dimness. But I do enjoy playing people who aren’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

POLLOK: Why is that?

APOLLONIO: I don’t want to say because I’m good at it because that sounds so arrogant, but I do think every actor has a wheelhouse of, like, four or five personality types that just inherently work with their format. Playing the fool is one of them for me. I just did this mockumentary where I’m a rock star and I’m trying to revive my career by doing a sex tape, but I can’t get hard. It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever done. But I love characters like that.

POLLOK: Who are some of the characters that inspire your work?

APOLLONIO: Like I said before, I love anything Michael Pitt has done. River Phoenix is a huge one for me. Leonardo DiCaprio. More recently, I’ve been enjoying Eddie Redmayne. It’s interesting because most of my favorite actors aren’t funny, even though I mostly play these funny, fool-type characters. I remember when I first started acting I wanted to play deeply pained characters with serious problems. I would still love for that to happen but that doesn’t seem like what God or whatever universal force exists had in store for me. I want to do so much shit. I want to play the fool and dabble in drama.

JOE APOLLONIO is an actor based in New York City. He plays Justin in Magic Farm, which is out now at select theaters and available to stream on MUBI.

TESS POLLOK is a writer and the editor of Animal Blood.