River Gallo on queer thriller Ponyboi and their ‘magnetic connection’ with Murray Bartlett

“I really didn’t do much other than have a little dream and write it down and then yeah, it just sort of happened,” beams River Gallo, in a daze of wonder at where they’ve found themself. 

It must be history’s most understated description of spending the best part of a decade writing a performance piece, turning it into a short film, and then crafting it into a glossy feature film – which they also star in. But with Gallo’s knotty noir-romantic crime thriller Ponyboi now out in US cinemas, perhaps it feels good to focus on the destination they’ve arrived at, rather than the journey taken to get there. And there certainly was a journey.

Ponyboi, which takes its name from the 1992 Bruce Springsteen song (albeit with different spelling) stars Gallo as the titular lead, an intersex, Latinx sex worker living in New Jersey.

Under the thumb of his drug-dealing pimp and occasional lover Vinnie (a fittingly brutish Dylan O’Brien), Ponyboi entertains in the backroom of the laundromat he works in with his pregnant friend – and Vinnie’s girlfriend – Angel (You’s Victoria Pedretti). In classic crime nail-biter style, one of Ponyboi’s slimier clients croaks it during a session, leaving the anti-hero on the run with a case of cash and a vengeful pimp on his trail.

Ponyboi is fiction – Gallo is no fugitive on the run – but “it has proven to be very challenging at times, just like the autobiographical nature of some elements of the movie,” Gallo says over Zoom.

Gallo, a Salvadoran-American, is also Latinx. The 34-year-old was also born and raised in New Jersey; you can hear it in their drawl; Ponyboi oozes the state’s grit. In flashbacks, Ponyboi recalls a fractured relationship with his macho father; Gallo has spoken about their own complex relationship with their dad. The actor, like Ponyboi, was also born intersex, and had medical intervention forced upon them as a child. Yet when the hormone injections began for Gallo aged 12, the doctor failed to even use the word “intersex”.

All of this history is laid bare in Ponyboi, as Gallo’s performance, melding bruised vulnerability with glowing optimism, is the film’s highlight.

“When I first started making the movie, I identified as a cisgendered queer man and by the end, I now identify as trans femme and non-binary and intersex. I also didn’t know the word intersex before making the short film,” Gallo says. “On a certain level, I just can’t believe that I made a film like [this] that was so personal at a time when information of me being intersex was still new to me.”

Ponyboi began as “these performance art pieces in strange places in New York”, taking shape on stage while Gallo studied at New York University. Gallo then enrolled onto a master’s programme at the University of Southern California, where Ponyboi was turned into a short film. As a child, they would spend days finger painting, and they describe watching their art grow, change and boom over the years as like watching a Pokémon evolve.

Yet Gallo seemed to evolve from small Magikarp to roaring Gyarados at breakneck speed. While creating the Ponyboi short, British entertainment legends Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson came on board as producers. “It was very meaningful to know that these icons of culture are saying like, ‘Yeah, we believe in this work, and we believe in you as an artist.’”

The short became the first film to star a publicly intersex actor as an intersex character, and went on to wow the film festival circuit in 2019. A year later, Gallo began writing Ponyboi as a fully fledged feature, with Esteban Arango on board as director.

Once writing was completed, a punch of streaming age star power propelled it forward. In addition to Pedretti and O’Brien, Pose actress Indya Moore plays Ponyboi’s old friend and trans woman Charlie in a brief yet vital scene, while The White Lotus star Murray Bartlett is Bruce, a tender, mirage-like daddy clad in a cowboy hat, who sees Ponyboi for who they really are, not who their circumstances have made them out to be.

It might sound like a series of dominoes that simply fell into place. At least where Bartlett’s involvement is concerned, that’s exactly what happened. Not that Gallo remembers, but they met Bartlett at a screening of the Ponyboi short at New York’s Tribeca Festival. “Like a month later, he, like, called me and I had no idea who he was. It’s like, ‘Who are you? How did you get my number?’,” Gallo says, eyes widening.

Bartlett had wanted them to work together on a separate project, but the stars couldn’t align. “Flash forward [to] 2022, The White Lotus was out and our director Esteban suggested Murray for Bruce, the cowboy character. And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, I know Murray.’  And then I just emailed him. I was like, ‘Do you want to be my movie?’” Obviously, he said yes. “He’s since become a dear friend of mine,” Gallo grins. “I call Murray my mom, because he’s like a mom! And he’s just one of the loveliest people on the planet.”

Which is lucky, as the pair did have to get up close and personal for an intimate scene or two. “Those sex scenes were really funny,” Gallo recalls, because “80 per cent of the simulated sex scenes were all shot on one day. So it was just, like, intense”. Aside from those humorous, if intense scenes, filming with Bartlett was an overall career highlight. “We just had such a magnetic connection with each other.”

Casting for Vinnie was less of a God shot moment. It was the last role the team cast for, because they feared a lack of interest in a role which revolves around inflicting violence and abuse towards women and intersex people. O’Brien wanted to come on board because “he just knew how important telling an intersex story” was, particularly considering its historic LGBTQ+ representation. The Twinless actor has a trans masc sibling, so “he felt like it was like a no-brainer that he needed to participate in it”.

Working with the “sweet, funny” former Teen Wolf star was a joy, Gallo says. “He just has the ability of taking up space but with zero ego, and being able to fully be a character and then just completely jump out of it,” they smile. “It’s a nice set to be around when someone can be an awful character, and then afterwards we could just, you know, shoot the sh*t.”

In 2020, when the feature started to come together, the world’s view on gender shifted. It was the year of JK Rowling’s infamous “TERF Wars” essay, in which she first voiced her “concerns” about pro-trans activism. Vitriolic headlines about the community ramped up, but so too did demand for better, more vivid representation of the LGBTQ+ community and all its nuances.

Gallo realised Ponyboi was weightier than first thought. “I think any artist who’s making work on subjects that haven’t been talked about in culture has a certain level of responsibility – and to a certain extent, burden – to be the first to talk about things in a way that sets a precedent for other things to come,” they explain. “I knew that I had to do this first and foremost for my community and something that they would see and they would enjoy.”

The result is a coming-of-age rush with glimmers of the intersex experience, but it’s far from didactic. “There’s a version of this movie that could have been completely about Ponyboi’s experience, being intersex,” Gallo says, but instead, “I wanted to make something exciting and fun to watch, to sort of get people on the train… and not get bogged down by the sort of the drama of the intersex identity crisis.”

Of course, the hope is that viewers who aren’t intersex, or indeed LGBTQ+, can at least have their “curiosity piqued”. Yet of all the people Ponyboi can impact, it’s Gallo who has been changed by it most.

“It’s really made me confront and invite my identity as an intersex person into my life in so many facets. I hope people who see the movie can genuinely see that authenticity, of what it means to rewrite your personal narrative,” Gallo says.

“I think that’s a lot of what Ponyboi does in the movie. He decides to, yeah, sort of walk into his power and change the trajectory of his life. In many ways, that’s sort of what I did by choosing to walk the path of making the film itself.”

Ponyboi is out now in select US cinemas. 

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