When Joe Apollonio, the 34-year-old New York internet comic with a wild coif of reddish hair, names River Phoenix as one of his favorite actors, it all makes sense. They have a similar countercultural vibe — not to mention fashionably unkempt hairstyle — and a hunger to take on roles that scare them, and often put their own autobiography front and center.
“I get shit sometimes from my friends for not watching certain movies,” Apollonio told IndieWire at a brewery in Bryant Park (though Apollonio is five years sober). “I would say that I’m a huge fan of River Phoenix’s work and Gus Van Sant’s work. And then also movies that Michael Pitt’s been in the 2000s, like ‘The Dreamers.’ I would say those are the two actors that I look up to the most. Interestingly enough, they’re not comedians.”
Apollonio broke out from his long-running Instagram feed of quippy queer characters and outsize personalities with a solo show at Joe’s Pub in New York’s Noho in summer 2023, one that put his very close relationship with his single mom front and center. He now stars in his friend Amalia Ulman’s quirky ethnocentricity satire “Magic Farm,” which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, followed by Berlin, and opens from MUBI in theaters this Friday.
In it, he plays Justin, the flamboyantly gay cohort of a Vice Media-like documentary crew chasing an influencer in a small town in Argentina. Or, where they think is Argentina anyway, until they end up in the wrong South American country in a town also called San Cristobal.
Apollonio grew up in the town of Babylon, Long Island, before moving to New York City after high school, training at Stella Adler and finding small roles on series like “Betty,” “Hacks,” and “Young Sheldon.”
“In ‘Hacks,’ I played a circuit twink with Owen Thiele. It was just two scenes in one episode. ‘Betty,’ I played a skater,” Apollonio, a longtime skateboarder himself, said. “Then, I did ‘Young Sheldon.’ I played some angsty younger brother to Mandy, and it was fun. They turned that character into a main character on the spinoff of ‘Young Sheldon’ [‘George and Mandy’s First Marriage’], but they cast someone else.”
Was he disappointed? “At the time, yeah. Now, I’m over it. If I try to play the tape forward, being in something like ‘Magic Farm,’ it’s an edgy enough thing for me to still be myself with things that I create, and it makes sense because it’s on par. It’s under the same umbrella. To be in something that mainstream and just for nuclear families in middle America [like ‘Young Sheldon’], maybe I would have to censor myself and dilute myself down.”
Indeed, Apollonio makes his queerness the focal point of his Instagram comedy, where he has more than 14,000 followers and self-made video posts dating back a decade, often outré-costumed and hilariously, grotesquely Facetuned, dating back to 2014.
“I don’t place as much value on [social media] as I used to,” he said. “I would say that’s how it really started, and then I think where it’s going to continue is stuff like this and taking my writing and putting it up on stage, or making longer-form videos or movies. Instagram is so oversaturated now with people who think that they’re funny, and they can just make a joke about something going on in the zeitgeist. I don’t really want any part of that. I want to make things that are valuable to me, and I also don’t want to make a bunch of shit for no money and just have it completely sidelined in this thralling crazy pool of the comedy algorithm, so I’m kind of over it.”
Apollonio’s solo show back at Joe’s Pub more fully expressed his particular brand of comedy, which is often all about his closeness with his mom. “She had a knee replacement last year where I took care of her. It’s kind of a vignette into what my life is going to look like at some point, which is a bit scary, but I can’t be doing a cross-country move right now unless I have enough money to take her with me,” he said of the thought of moving to L.A.
“The only relieving thing is everyone has to deal with this shit. She’s a single mom, and I’m an only child. It’s always been just us my entire life; no real semblance of blood family has been in the picture. It’s just an added heaviness to it,” he added.
“She thinks my comedy is a little weird. I impersonate her sometimes. It’s a central part of my work,” he said. “It’s weird, though, because she’s a Baby Boomer, and their notion of Hollywood and acting is far different from what it is now. I’ve been on TV and stuff, but she’s always like, ‘When are you going to make it? I wish someone would just discover you.’ That’s not how it works, though.”
Argentine-born Spanish artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman — the director of 2021’s “El Planeta,” also about an only child’s too-closeness with their mother — has been good friends with Apollonio for a few years now, which made it easy to cast him in “Magic Farm” among an ensemble that includes Chloë Sevigny, Simon Rex, and Alex Wolff. “People thought Amalia and I were dating,” Apollonio said. “Maybe we look good together. I don’t know.” (In real life, Apollonio is dating trans star Bianca Leigh, who stars on Broadway’s “Oh, Mary!”)
That friendship eventually led to Chloë Sevigny, with whom Ulman had connected and whom Apollonio met at a Maison Margiela party before they got to work on the script with producer/filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko (a producer alongside Riccardo Maddalosso and Alex Hughes). That was not, in fact, the first time Apollonio had encountered the New York City icon.
“I was a barback at this place called Peel’s in the Lower East Side. I was like 22, and she was sitting at a table and I had to pour her hot water into her tea, and I was so starstruck that my hands were shaking like fucking crazy as I’m pouring the hot water. She was just kind of looking down. I left the table and was like, ‘Wow, I fucking blew it.’ I brought that up to Chloe. She didn’t remember it,” he recalled.
Once production on “Magic Farm” got underway in 2023, “We were filming in this town called San Antonio de Areco, which is two hours northwest of Buenos Aires. People go there to vacation; it’s kind of like a resort town. It’s very small, a lot of horses, a lot of street dogs, a pretty desolate landscape. That’s where we shot the whole movie. Then we shot some stuff in New York about a month or so afterward,” he said. “I don’t speak Spanish, so any sort of broken horrible Spanish I would use to order food made me feel super American. I remember the first day I got there, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was strutting down the street with my aviator glasses on, listening to music. I quickly got out of my own head and realized everyone was staring at me like an alien.”
While “Magic Farm” drummed up buzz at Sundance and then Berlin (“the Germans loved it”), Apollonio said, “I’m still waiting to see what will come from this,” though he’s working on yet another personal project aimed for the stage. “I don’t want to get too much into what it’s about, but it’s going to be another mother-and-son dynamic show, but it’s going to be much more fictional and much more over-the-top and ridiculous,” he said.
One thing he’s not doing any time soon, and one thing he has in common with his co-star Sevigny? He’s not moving to Los Angeles. “I would need a swimming pool, and a really loving partner, which I do have right now, and a lot of money for me to enjoy L.A. I don’t want to deal with the in-betweens of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. It’s excruciating enough to be between jobs. L.A. is really cool when you have something to do. I subletted there a few times, and you don’t have anything going on and your friends are busy, it can get dark. And you’re getting gaslit by the weather to be happy,” he said.
“Magic Farm” is now in theaters from MUBI.
