When Sebastián Silva started writing Rotting in the Sun, he knew it would contain two things: the specter of death and “an annoying fucking gringo.â€
Silva pictured the gringo character as a real-estate agent. Then he met Jordan Firstman, the popular but polarizing comic best known for impersonating inanimate objects and abstract concepts on Instagram. They share mutual friends, but Silva, who doesn’t care to see anyone’s selfies, much less watch their front-facing-camera videos, didn’t know anything about Firstman when the pair happened upon each other at a park in Mexico City, where Silva moved after COVID-19 hit. He found Firstman obnoxious and self-involved, which provided a stroke of inspiration: This was the annoying fucking gringo his film needed.
Soon enough, Silva and Firstman were on set together, playing themselves in a hyper-meta satire and having what Firstman calls “blowout fights†in the process.
Rotting in the Sun, which premiered at Sundance in January and comes out this month (September 8 in theaters; September 15 on Mubi), is the longest Silva has gone between movies. His last release was 2018’s racially loaded cringe comedy Tyrel, though he’s since directed episodes of Los Espookys and joined the writers’ room for The Staircase. That same year, a drama he made about the aftermath of a deadly Puerto Rican hurricane premiered at Telluride but didn’t land a distributor. Silva has appeared in his own work before, most notably the underrated 2015 thriller Nasty Baby co-starring Kristen Wiig and Tunde Adebimpe, but never like this — never as “Sebastián Silva,†a borderline-suicidal stalled artist who reads The Trouble With Being Born at a gay nude beach and routinely disappears into K-holes.
Silva and Firstman augment their worst traits in Rotting, burying a propulsive comedy of errors inside seemingly indulgent autofiction. On the beach, Sebastián encounters a naked Jordan, who announces that he’d watched Silva’s Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus the night before and insists Sebastián help him write a TV show described as “Curb Your Enthusiasm but positive.†In need of money, Sebastián reluctantly agrees. Rotting starts with the chaotic convergence of a frustrated filmmaker and a tireless internet personality, but it ends somewhere else entirely.
Firstman was game to mock the narcissistic persona that won him a robust following when his videos blew up during the pandemic lockdown. Sometimes that mockery is brutal. In a fraught scene, Sebastián calls Jordan a clown and yells, “You do impressions because you are nobody.†The ever-chipper Jordan still shows up at Sebastián’s apartment for a weeklong writing binge, only to find him missing. Seb’s overburdened housekeeper (Catalina Saavedra from Silvia’s 2009 breakthrough, The Maid) claims she can’t account for his whereabouts, prompting a mad dash to track down Jordan’s absent collaborator. Jordan even terminates a foursome — including unsimulated double penetration that required a nudity rider unlike anything Firstman’s lawyers have witnessed — after making an abrupt discovery that might help him locate Sebastián.
If stuff got hairy between Silva and Firstman during production, it makes sense. The Chilean director and his crew communicated in Spanish, of which Firstman speaks none. Firstman, who appeared in Search Party and Ms. Marvel but has never had a lead role, struggled to understand how scenes were being blocked — a vulnerable position when you’re already razzing yourself for public consumption. On top of that, his agents had cautioned him against doing the film at all, wanting him to pursue more mainstream parts instead. Tensions mounted as some of the same qualities that Silva and Firstman were attempting to lampoon arose off-camera. In one scene, for example, Firstman wears Melania Trump’s infamous “I really don’t care, do u?†Zara parka. Silva really didn’t want him to wear it, fearing the jacket would be distracting. Firstman insisted. Silva eventually relented, then walked into another room and screamed into a towel.
“Jordan would say things like, ‘I’m not really digging that. It’s giving student film,’†Silva recalls. (The project has a promotional waiver from SAG.) “I was like, ‘Bitch, this is my ninth feature. I’ve been in all the fancy festivals. Why are you giving me advice like this?’ But imagine how triggering that could be: He shows up on set and we’re saying jokes about him in Spanish. It was obviously alienating, and I wasn’t there to take care of his feelings because I was making a movie. It’s an independent movie and you’re rushing. Also, I’m diagnosed super-ADD and a total stoner. I wasn’t giving him the attention he needed, because he needs a lot of attention — like, way more than other people.â€
At the end of the first week, Firstman made what seems like a modest request. “I said, ‘Sebastián, please, at the end of the day, just say, “Good job,’†he says. “And he goes, ‘Dude, I’m not just gonna say something because you tell me to say it.’â€
Silva, who camouflages his humanistic films in art-house edge, isn’t innately a “Good job!†kind of guy. But the two of them got through it, learning how to communicate in a way their onscreen counterparts never quite do. Today, Firstman laughs it off, calling the experience “hell on Earth.†They hung around Mexico City for a week after the shoot and partied their cares away. “It was so healing for us,†he says. “It was a beautiful experience.â€
Had Silva walked away hating his guts, Firstman would have been used to that, too. His overnight renown attracted distinguished fans like Ariana Grande, Chrissy Teigen, and Katie Couric, but his quest for recognition — not to mention old tone-deaf tweets, for which he apologized — rankles a contingent of the extremely online. In a 2020 profile, the Cut called Firstman “the cocky prince of quarantine comedy.â€
“I like how I’m portrayed so negatively in the movie because I do trigger people and I have a swath of haters, mostly gay men,†he says. “It’s really disappointing because I spent my 20s trying to make gay stuff for gay people. When you see someone dive headfirst into success — I wasn’t humble about it. But neither is Nicki Minaj. Neither is Ice Spice. That is a similar game that I’m playing, but because I’m a gay guy playing the game, it’s seen as, like, completely cringe or self-indulgent. But I’ve always been an ambitious person. I cringe at myself, too, but I also know it’s part of the game if you want this.â€
Late in the film, during a dark night of the soul, Jordan proclaims that he detests himself and his followers, calling them enablers. Coming from someone who has actively courted his 803,000-strong Instagram audience, it’s a knotty rebuke. (“What is this dark new personality?†a friend asks during Jordan’s freakout. “It’s unwatchable.â€) Firstman’s willingness to make his avatar as presumptuous as possible — just as Silva’s is as pretentious and spacey as possible — results in a fascinating act of laceration. At the same time, it hands Firstman’s skeptics more ammo. He’s in on the joke, but the joke means he’s the face of a cool Sundance indie that’s earning a rarefied version of the spotlight Firstman so clearly craves. That is, if his algorithm-happy admirers even clock his pursuits outside of social media.
“Sebastián’s movie is way funnier than anything I’ve ever put on the internet,†he says. “But these white girls are probably gonna hate Sebastián’s movie.â€
Rotting in the Sun, co-written with Pedro Peirano, is personal for Silva, too, and not just because he actually is an existential director disinterested in leveling up with the corporate opportunities Hollywood has to offer. His whippet, Chima, plays a key part in the story, as does Silva’s fondness for psychedelics, his ventures as a painter (currently his primary income source), and his “judgmental†tendencies.
“I was concerned because making a movie where you put yourself and your name and your dog and movies that I’ve made can be seen as completely self-absorbed, which it is, in a way,†he says. “But we tried to have a good balance of not going overboard on self-deprecation, which is also a sign of ego. This and Nasty Baby both feel like a very sharp criticism of the life that I live. At the beginning of this movie, I am tired of a life that is not tiresome at all.â€
By pure coincidence, Silva and Firstman now live seven minutes apart in Los Angeles. They went to see the new Dungeons & Dragons movie together, requesting refunds midway through because they thought it was too loud. During the hour we spent chatting, they showed the sort of mutual admiration that’s most palpable when you’ve been in the trenches with someone. Their friendship doesn’t feel like one of those chummy showbiz performances. Not all co-stars gossip about making out with the same guys at a club in New York the night before.
“For both of us. I think watching the movie is a big warning sign,†Firstman says. “Now we can look at certain parts of our personality and be like, Would the character do that? Let’s maybe do something different.â€