absurd sensations

not just playing a role

making music, writing, planning films. that brings me back to my center. that’s where I have control. where I’m not just playing a role - Connor Storrie, Vogue Adria, March 2026

The directorial debut is one of the laziest categories the entertainment press has. It implies that an actor has recently decided to try something new - that the film is an experiment, a pivot, a vanity project, a side door opened by fame. Sometimes that is true. Often it is not. Often the work being called a debut is only the public surfacing of something that has been going on in private for years. The mistake is treating the visible moment as the beginning. The arrival on the festival list is the announcement, not the start.

In a March interview with Vogue Adria, between questions about Lanthimos and love stories, Storrie says something that most readers will file under "actor talks about creative process" and move on. The quote is this: making music, writing, planning films - that brings me back to my center. That's where I have control. Where I'm not just playing a role.

The last clause is the one that matters. Not where I feel most myself or where I express who I am - the phrasing is more exact than that: where I'm not just playing a role. It draws a line between acting and making without dismissing either. It suggests that performance, however central it may be to his public life, is not the only mode in which he understands himself. The making is the negative space. It is what remains when the role falls away.

This is a distinction worth sitting with, because it reframes how Transaction Planet ought to be read. The film - shot on an iPhone across three weeks in Los Angeles, produced almost entirely alone, financed with the last of his Heated Rivalry money when he was months away from going back to waiting tables - has been described in press as his "directorial debut", which is technically accurate and almost completely useless as a description. A directorial debut implies an actor trying something new. What Storrie is describing is closer to a return, in public, to work he has been doing in private for years.

He has been making things, in one form or another, since before anyone was watching. The music - industrial techno, he specifies, very German, very Russian, the kind that was big in Europe in the nineties - existed before Heated Rivalry. The interest in Russian music predates the show by nearly a decade; he has said he started listening around 2015 or 2016, names IC3PEAK specifically, and built an old-Russian-love-ballad playlist for himself when he started preparing to play Ilya. He has a DJ alter ego, The Czar, under whose name he makes experimental electronic music he says will never see the light of day. The clown training existed before Heated Rivalry. The earlier short film, Jerry The Ginger Eater, existed before Heated Rivalry. Seen in that sequence, Heated Rivalry begins to look less like the destination of a career than the interruption of another one: the acting breakthrough that arrived inside a broader and older pattern of making.

What the making provides that acting doesn't is tactility. Storrie uses the word himself: I need tactile things to ground me. There's something in the act of making that is physical in a way that performing is not, even when the performance is physical. The iPhone in his hand. The locations around LA that cost nothing because he knew them. These are not the conditions of a vanity project. They're the conditions of someone who needs to make contact with something real.

The iPhone, as he says, is inspiring - limitation forces you toward what is important rather than letting you get lost in production value or aesthetic. It makes you focus on the story. That's a familiar independent-film argument, but in this case it also clarifies the Vogue Adria line. If acting risks becoming role-play in the broadest sense - image and repetition, the long career of performed self - then making under accepted constraint becomes a way back to the underlying problem of what can be built, and with what. The smaller the apparatus, the harder it is to dodge the question.

Transaction Planet is about an alien spirit dropped into a human body in a hyperbolic version of Los Angeles, who denies a woman a dollar and has his eye plucked out, and must then fight to get it back. It is, he says, a modernised fairy tale - which is to say, it's about someone new to having a body, navigating a world that operates by rules they didn't make and can't quite follow, trying to recover something essential that was taken from them almost immediately upon arrival.

It would be too neat to reduce that theme to biography. Still, some biographical facts make the film's interest in dislocation harder to ignore. Storrie has said he changed schools thirteen times growing up. That doesn't explain the film, and criticism shouldn't pretend it does. But it sharpens the resonance of a story organised around abrupt arrival, unstable identity, and adaptation to unfamiliar systems. The film's fascination with disorientation seems to sit close to a life repeatedly marked by movement, adjustment, and re-entry.

The interview, the production history, and the premise are all doing the same work. Storrie's making looks like the underlying practice from which acting briefly distracts. Which is why the Vogue Adria quote matters. "Not just playing a role" is a description of how he actually works. Acting is the profession through which he is recognised. Making seems to be where authorship, tactility, and control are restored.

the saint laurent production

The studio system used to do this work. It would place an actor inside a house style - Paramount's polish, Warner's grit, MGM's gloss - and the films that followed would teach the audience how to read the body on screen. The construction was the credentialing. The work and the legibility arrived together.

That structure is gone. What has emerged in its place, at the top end, is a patchwork: streamers, festivals, A24-style production-as-brand, and now luxury houses with film arms. None of them is the studio system, but together they do a version of what the studio system did. They place an actor inside an aesthetic, fund the films that would let that aesthetic be visible, and tell the audience - quietly, through company kept - how to look. The interesting actors are the ones whose patchwork is internally consistent. The uninteresting ones get assembled out of whatever is offering.

In January, in a tiny side room at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, the photographer Ezra Petronio shot a portrait of Anthony Vaccarello's extended Saint Laurent family. Kate Moss, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Béatrice Dalle, Rami Malek, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kid Cudi, the filmmaker Gaspar Noé. And Connor Storrie - a twenty-six-year-old actor from Odessa, Texas, listed in the roll call, photographed, quoted. "I got into Saint Laurent through the sunglasses, he said. I think the brand is very chic without being boring. It's rock 'n' roll."

The quote is doing the work of a quote in a fashion feature: light, brand-compliant, not revealing very much. The room is doing more.

The house Vaccarello has built over ten years is not just a fashion brand that happens to dress actors. It is a production apparatus. In 2023, Vaccarello launched Saint Laurent Productions, which has since co-financed films by Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, Paolo Sorrentino, Jacques Audiard, and Jim Jarmusch, with Gaspar Noé's Lux Æterna already in the lineage from the same creative relationship. Lux Æterna stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Béatrice Dalle. Both of whom were in the Petronio portrait room.

This is the part of the alignment that matters.

When Storrie shows up at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in a sheer Saint Laurent turtleneck, or sits front row at the AW26 menswear show, or appears in the January portraits, two readings are immediately available, and both are wrong. The casual reading files it as celebrity fashion. The slightly knowing reading files it as brand ambassadorship. Both treat the clothing as the content and the films as a separate, unrelated category. A more accurate reading is that an actor whose stated influences are Lynch, Lanthimos, Amirpour, and Cregger - and whose own short has been compared by commenters, repeatedly, to Gaspar Noé - is publicly aligning himself with the one major fashion house currently producing feature films by filmmakers in that lineage. The turtleneck is the visible edge of a deeper congruence. The clothes describe a transaction. The slate describes a contract.

Jerry the Ginger Eater draws the Noé comparison for reasons that survive a close reading. The camera rarely flinches. The body is treated as both subject and object without shame. The desire depicted is present, in a frame that refuses to look away. Lux Æterna does the refusal differently - split-screen, strobe, an explicit meditation on the image of Joan at the stake as film image - though the underlying argument is the same. The body in extremity is a frame to be held, and the camera's job, in the presence of discomfort, is to stay. Storrie learned that somewhere. Whether from Noé directly or from the broader river of which Noé is a tributary - Pasolini, Clark, Denis, Amirpour - the lesson has been taken. The more interesting fact is that commenters are already reading Storrie’s short in that neighborhood.

Saint Laurent Productions makes that neighbourhood easier to see. Vaccarello has described his interest in film as a way of extending the brand's life beyond the ephemerality of the runway. A catwalk show, that will pass, he told the FT. But the name Saint Laurent being associated with a film is a guarantee that the name will still be alive in 20, 30, 40 years. This is a fashion-house justification. The more honest version, implied by the slate of directors he is producing, is that Vaccarello has built a minor but serious arthouse production company inside a luxury brand, and that the work it is producing - Parthenope, Father Mother Sister Brother, Emilia Pérez, Lux Æterna - constitutes a specific cinematic sensibility. Formally committed. Tonally strange. Narratively unafraid of genre. Concerned with the body. French-adjacent in register even when the filmmaker is Argentinian or Italian or American.

This is the cinematic neighbourhood Storrie's work seems to live in. Transaction Planet, as described, belongs on the same shelf as Lux Æterna and Enter the Void in the way it belongs on the shelf as early John Waters or Pi-era Aronofsky - not by resemblance but by temperament. The alien-in-wrong-body premise is Noé-adjacent in its bodily estrangement; the fairy tale framing is closer to Amirpour; the iPhone-alone-in-LA production method is Sean Baker. What ties them is the refusal to let the body be ordinary. The body is always new, always arriving somewhere, always learning how to be in a room.

This does not mean a formal collaboration is inevitable. Storrie has not been announced on a Saint Laurent Productions project, and there is no need to pretend otherwise. But careers are shaped not only by finished works, but by rooms entered, patrons acquired, and systems of taste within which an artist becomes recognisable. Saint Laurent is one of those systems. It is a fashion house, yes. It is also, increasingly, a way of signalling cinematic company kept.

This is the patchwork doing the studio system's old job, in a smaller way, for a younger figure. Not a studio building him an image; a fashion house funding the cinema he is already legible inside, and including him in the family portrait while it does. The cynical reading - that he has been credentialed by a luxury brand - gets the direction wrong. He is not being credentialed. He is being recognised by the institution most equipped, currently, to recognise him.

the leading man construction

The reason the leading man image survives - Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, James Dean - is that it is still the most efficient construction available for getting a strange interior into a general room. The tuxedo is a vessel. The tailoring is a delivery mechanism. Done well, the calibrated public form lets the private work reach the audience without being flattened in transit. Done badly, it is a costume - a visible attempt to convert strangeness into spectacle, which is the move most contemporary red-carpet culture defaults to. The form is older than the people who wear it, and it works on a principle most contemporary celebrity styling has forgotten: the polished surface is the condition of the strangeness reaching the room, not the suppression of it.

In a late-January feature for Vanity Fair's Stylist Sessions, the London stylist James Yardley - the person who has been dressing Connor Storrie since the Toronto premiere of Heated Rivalry - names the organising principle of what he has been building. It's about styling him not with a costume element, because it's never that, but with a nod to leading men from Hollywood history. Pre-1920s Kiton at the premiere. The 1920s and 30s wider-leg cuts that reappeared in the 70s. Saint Laurent tuxedos. Tiffany brooches. A chartreuse Entire Studios coat at NBC that, by Yardley's own account, went wild. Cary Grant and James Dean are named, in that order, as the quotations. The result is described - by Yardley, by the Vanity Fair writer, by the industry sources the piece quotes on Storrie's reported exclusive Saint Laurent deal for the season - as slick and polished and quietly confident and a leading man.

The phrase is worth sitting with. The leading man, as a figure, is a form - a shape a person can move through. The Old Hollywood construction was built by the studios to give certain bodies a public form they could move through without being consumed by it. Rock Hudson. Montgomery Clift. James Dean. Cary Grant. Each of them was difficult, private, strange in ways the construction was specifically designed to hold. The tailored suit gave the complicated interior a surface through which it could appear. Done well, the leading man image is a vessel - the calibrated public form that lets the private work reach the room.

This is the arrangement Yardley is restaging. And he is restaging it for someone who already the inside of the arrangement covered. Storrie's artistic work is already on public record, in the way these things are now: the stripper clown character, hit by the party bus, unable to disrobe, in constant pain. The Jerry the Ginger Eater short. The alien-in-a-body upcoming feature. The Czar, the DJ alter ego under whose name he makes experimental electronic music he says will never see the light of day. They are the work of an artist whose imagination is formally committed and tonally strange. The question the styling is solving, without ever stating it as a question, is how that artist reaches a general audience without the strangeness being flattened in the transit.

Clown training is the connective tissue. What clown training is, at the level of practice, is the disciplined use of the body in exposed, undignified, unembarrassed ways in front of other people. The clown is a body willing to be wrong in public. That willingness runs through Storrie’s work in different forms: the injured stripper who keeps trying to perform; the alien body in Transaction Planet, new to rules it does not understand; the willingness to appear shirtless in an editorial or let an image travel without defensive explanation. These are not identical gestures, but they suggest a continuity: a performer unusually prepared to let the body become strange in front of other people.

Seen that way, clown training and the leading-man image are not opposites. They are two different techniques for managing exposure. Clowning rehearses strangeness until embarrassment loses its grip. The Old Hollywood construction refines the public surface until strangeness can pass through it without being mistaken for incoherence. One works by stripping away dignity; the other by tailoring it. Yardley is handling the latter. Storrie did the rehearsal before he met Yardley.

Yardley articulates the principle almost exactly in a phrase he probably mean casually: “Nothing ever feels loud; it’s always intentional, polished and quietly confident.” The quiet is the whole point. A loud construction would tip into costume-a visible attempt to convert strangeness into spectacle. That is what contemporary red-carpet culture often rewards, and precisely what Yardley keeps declining. A quiet construction is the Old Hollywood operation: the surface is calibrated precisely enough that the strangeness underneath has a shape through which it can arrive. Yardley notes that Storrie loves camp and colour in editorials, but that this is not who he is on a red carpet. The distinction is telling. The carpet is for the construction. The editorial is where the strange can look openly strange. Each setting has its own register, and each is being used deliberately.

The reported exclusive Saint Laurent deal is the structural continuation of this logic. Vaccarello has built, under the house, a complete aesthetic operation - runway, productions, ambassadors, photography - in which the Old Hollywood arrangement has been carried forward. Gainsbourg. Dalle. Noé. Kate Moss. The Petronio portrait at the Bourse de Commerce. Saint Laurent is one of the few remaining houses that routinely places strange artists in polished public forms without asking them to get less strange. Yardley is running the Storrie-specific version of that operation. Together, the two of them are keeping the Old Hollywood form in active service - revivable, inhabitable, and being actively used on somebody whose work requires it.

What the construction makes possible, in the end, is the continuation of the work. Storrie can keep making the cannibal short and the iPhone feature and the Tzar Domynik industrial techno music because the tailored suit exists and the tailored suit is doing its job. The leading man gets dressed, goes to the carpet, and returns to the edit suite in the morning. In the Vanity Fair piece, Yardley describes the dressing as something close to a collaborative craft - the time Storrie spends in fittings, the refitting, the racks methodically worked through, the paint-splattered jeans at their first meeting that told Yardley Storrie already had his own point of view. The construction is a made object. It is assembled, twice a week, in a fitting room. And it is in service of the work.

That is what the leading-man construction has always been, at least in its most intelligent form. Not the suppression of strangeness, but its carriage. Not the replacement of the private self, but the making of a public vessel sturdy enough to let private work survive contact with fame.

reading too far into instagram posts

"I Would Die 4 U" - Prince, 1984 (Tiffany Blue Book Gala, April 16 2026)

I'm not a woman, I'm not a man I am something that you'll never understand

Following the Tiffany Blue Book gala at the Park Avenue Armory, Connor posts two minutes of Prince's I Would Die 4 U. He was there as Tiffany house ambassador - the first time that particular phrase has been attached to his name - wearing a ruby and diamond brooch from Nathalie Verdeille's Hidden Garden, a Bird on a Rock descendant in a collection organised, throughout, around things still becoming. The Twin Bud mid-opening. The butterflies. The bird on its rock, not yet departed, not yet still. The Veterans Room is one of the few surviving interiors Louis Comfort Tiffany himself completed. The architecture is old, the object history is dense, and the frame is about as settled as a frame can be.

The song choice cuts across that frame.

The easy reading of an artist like this accepting an ambassadorship like that, at the speed the internet reads these things, is that the guy with the clown training, the cannibal short, the experimental techno music, the alien-in-a-human-body feature cannot also be a luxury-heritage house ambassador without one of those positions being a lie. Either the weirder work is the truth and the gala is the concession, or the Park Avenue Armory in a suit and bird brooch is the truth and the strangeness was always branding. Pick one: that’s the true 'Connor'. What the song selection answers, quietly, is that the question assumes a self that was never on offer.

I Would Die 4 U is a declaration that refuses to make itself legible before it asks to be believed. Prince names the demand the listener is making - decode me, place me, sort me into the category you can hold - and declines it. I'm not a woman, I'm not a man, I am something that you'll never understand. The second section of the song is the offering that comes after the refusal. I would die for you. The generosity is real. The legibility is not being promised as a condition of it.

Read that way, the song choice is doing more than setting a mood. Against a setting built to stabilise meaning - old room, old brand, formal suit, jewellery with lineage - it places a song built around the refusal of stable classification. The effect is quiet, but pointed. The image says heritage. The soundtrack says: not so fast.

That is why the brooch matters too, it's the visual argument for the song. Verdeille's Hidden Garden is a collection about things suspended mid-movement, not yet arrived anywhere - which is the condition Prince's speaker is in, and which is the condition the post is staking out. Worn in the oldest and most settled possible frame, a room Louis Comfort Tiffany himself finished, the brooch miniaturises the proposition: you can be unresolved inside a finished room.

That idea rhymes with things Storrie has said elsewhere. He has spoken about making things in order to return to his center. Not for what the making sends back. As orientation. From that angle, the song choice does not reveal the “real” Connor beneath the formal image. It refuses that model altogether. There is no hidden self waiting under the heritage styling, no single line into which the whole thing can be collapsed. The heritage image is not false. The stranger artistic identity is not false either.

So yes, this may be reading too far into an Instagram post. But the post itself invites that kind of reading by choosing, after being in that room and under those conditions, a song whose entire structure is built around refusing to become legible on someone else’s terms.

It does not say: here is the real me beneath the stylish tailored suit. It says: the self you are asking to be made simple was never on offer.

Take what is being given. It is still real.

the most human film ever made

One of the most liked comments on the YouTube upload of Jerry the Ginger Eater, Connor Storrie's 2025 short, reads: “I’m 6 months sober actually” said by a woman on her way to help a cannibal murder her boss. this is the most human film ever made.

The comment is a joke. It is also, accidentally, the correct critical response. What the film does in fifteen minutes is take a situation that has no business being human - a cannibal pulls a sex worker into a car and explains, in a calm register, that he is going to eat her - and resolves it, scene by scene, into something resembling the small negotiations adults make when they have decided to be in a working relationship with someone they met under conditions that would, in any other genre, have produced a corpse.

The opening is transactional. Jerry has already decided. Tweaker is already cornered. The first thing she does is correctly assess that rape is not the threat on offer - “Can you just rape me, please? I'd rather that” which is a terrible line read as a request and a brilliant one read as an actor's instinct about where the scene's actual dread is located. Rape would be survivable. Being eaten is not. The film's first joke is that the sex worker, trained by her profession to read men, reaches for the wrong frame first and has to recalibrate in real time.

What Tweaker then does, inside about ninety seconds of screen time, is negotiate herself out of being the meal and into being the scout. She offers up her boss. Her boss is a ginger. Jerry agrees. The film does not hurry past the bargain. It wants you to watch two people, one of whom was about to eat the other, settle with startling efficiency, into the shared project of eating someone else. One comment registers the move cleanly: the way she negotiates herself OUT of being eaten and INTO a business partnership in under 90 seconds. women in the workplace. This is a screwball premise performed flat. The comedy is the competence.

The central formal trick of the film is that its language for violence is also its language for intimacy. Tweaker, trying to read the domestic context, asks about his wife. There is a woman, he says. “We’re very close. We’re very, very, very close.” Where is she? “She’s inside of me. She’s deep inside of me.” For a beat, the line hovers in euphemism. Then it collapses into the literal. “I ate her.” The exchange is funny because the euphemism collapses into the literal. It is also - and the film knows this - the most honest depiction of a certain kind of romantic absorption available to a fifteen-minute short. “I was saying it so that I didn't have to say it, but yeah, I ate her.” The film’s central romantic proposition, spoken in the only language it has access to, is that love is the thing you cannot metabolise without consuming, and consumption is the thing you cannot do without losing the person consumed. But the joke only works because the film recognises that cannibalism is the only emotional vocabulary it has. It cannot describe love except as a form of catastrophic incorporation.

That is why the scene lands as more than absurdism. The confession does not merely parody romantic language; it exposes something real inside it. The fantasy of absolute closeness, of having someone fully inside one’s life, one’s body, one’s self, is pushed to a grotesque conclusion. The cannibal idiom is not a metaphor laid over the story from outside but the story’s native language for attachment, need, and loss.

Tweaker's counter-confession works by the same logic. She talks about meth. She talks about how much she liked it. “I'd wake up in the morning and just smoke meth and have the best fucking day in the world, but every day.” She talks about being skinny. “I looked like Kate Moss in the Molly, you know? She's like, oh, I look heroin chic." She talks about how her sweat bleached her clothes - “every piece of clothing I had looked like a Pollock painting" - and then, asked “Pollock?”, explains, “Jackson Pollock”. The joke inside the joke is that she reaches, casually, for Jackson Pollock as the simile for her meth-bleached clothes - the art history and the addiction sharing a single register, as though they operate on the same shelf of her memory. The addiction confession is calibrated exactly the way the cannibal confession is calibrated: a person naming a hunger that was larger than the world's ability to contain it, and trying to make the naming funny enough to survive. “I'm 6 months sober, actually.” None of this is framed as redemption. What matters is that Tweaker knows what it is to live under the rule of an appetite larger than the world can contain. She has survived the kind of hunger Jerry still inhabits.

What makes Jerry the Ginger Eater work as a film, rather than as an exercise, is that the two characters are looking at each other from opposite sides of the same thing. Jerry is an appetite with no stopping condition. Tweaker is an appetite that has been stopped, and is therefore available to watch what an unstopped one looks like. The middle of the film, once the premise is set, is basically the two of them in a car, talking. “If you're going to eat, I really want to eat too. I'm really hungry.[....] Diet Coke and fries.” The hunger has to be fed constantly; the question is only what register it gets fed in.

The viewers reaching for David Lynch are correct and slightly off. One of the more striking comparisons, tucked further down in the thread, is this: Gregg Araki and Gaspar Noé had a baby and that baby forgot to take its Adderall and went and made this film. The reference is closer to what Jerry is actually doing. Lynch is the aesthetic inheritance - the willingness to let the dream and the real occupy the same frame, the trust in image over plausibility. Araki is the structural inheritance - the road film about bodies wrong for the world they are crossing, the willingness to treat sex work and drug use and queer desire as simply present. The Doom Generation is a road film about three young people who begin killing and cannot stop, and it is also a love story. Mysterious Skin is a film about childhood trauma and adult sex work that refuses to let either register cancel the other out. Kaboom is a queer conspiracy comedy that treats paranoia as erotic. The Araki lineage is a lineage of films that take bodies the culture has no plan for and put them into narrative structures that also have no plan for them, and film the resulting collisions with unembarrassed affection. Jerry sits inside that lineage.

Storrie has mentioned meeting Araki in passing; he has not, from what I could find, named Araki's films as an influence on this short. Viewers are reaching for the comparison independently, which is what an actual lineage tends to look like from outside - a rhyme the audience registers before the artist ever declares it.

The Noé half of the comparison does different work. What matters there is less influence than discipline. The camera in Jerry does not flinch from physical consequence, but neither does it sensationalise it. It holds. It trusts faces, rhythms, and proximity. The result is that comedy and confession can coexist inside the same shot without either one being underlined. This is Noé-adjacent discipline. Saint Laurent Productions produced Noé's Lux Æterna - the part of the alignment with Storrie that travels publicly. Viewers independently reaching for Noé when describing Jerry is the confirmation that the alignment is real.

One comment, worth quoting in full, reads: a love story between emotionally unavailable cannibal and a lonely tweaker, our generation's When Harry Met Sally. The joke reads as wrong on first pass and right on second. When Harry Met Sally is a film about whether men and women can be friends. Jerry the Ginger Eater is a film about whether two people who should by all rights have killed each other can be functional working partners. Both films propose that the answer is yes, but only after the correct amount of friction. Both are, structurally, love stories in which the love is non-sexual and earned. The comment is doing real critical work: it names the film's genre. Jerry is a romantic comedy in which the romance has been displaced into friendship, and the comedy has been displaced into the body.

That is what makes the short more than a stylish provocation. It is about appetite, certainly: about the body in the wrong context, and about what it costs to be hungry in a world that does not know how to feed you. But it is also about the strange forms of mutual recognition that become possible when two people discover that their hungers, however differently lived, are legible to one another. The darkness is the route to the tenderness.

Which is why the top comment, silly as it is, finally turns out to be right. “This is the most human film ever made” is a joke only until the film has persuaded you otherwise. By the end, it has earned the line.