He drinks Hennessy through his face mask and runs around screaming (and getting strangers to scream), “Suck my dick, Batman!” - a perfect manufactured beef between him and a guy in Philly who dresses as the Dark Knight. He has now appeared several times on the Sidetalk Instagram and amassed more than 100,000 followers on his personal account.
The trash-talking rapper dresses as Spider-Man (with the addition of Timberlands or sneakers, chains, and a Yankees fitted cap). One of those characters, who goes by Spider Cuz, has become a star in his own right. Instead, they started looking for interesting characters on social media and approaching them about being on the show. When they returned for the fall semester, this time as roommates in a rented apartment downtown, they wanted to start shooting again right away, but with COVID lowering the ambient energy in the streets, they realized they couldn’t rely on spontaneous encounters. They were devastated to have to interrupt their project. With no school and no dorms, Simonian was forced to return to his parents’ home in Malibu, Byrne to Long Island with his family. The Sidetalk account went from a few thousand followers to tens of thousands in a matter of days. Nicolas Heller, whom they had befriended on Instagram not long before, was with them at the time and posted his perspective on tagging them as a promotion. But it was the Purim video that was their breakthrough. We were just like, ‘Hey, guys, what’s up?’ ”Īfter starting Sidetalk their freshman year in the fall of 2019, the duo spent most days of the week outside, after, before, and in between classes, filming the people they encountered. “We ran up the steps of the brownstone into the house, and there were all these Hasidic men going crazy, jumping around. “We filmed that video in 30 minutes.” They’d been having a terrible day finding nothing to shoot, but with a mix of ease and fearlessness, they happened to see an open door and walked through. “We couldn’t remake it if we tried,” Byrne admits. There’s an unhinged energy to the encounter.
In one of the boys’ favorite episodes, filmed on the dangerous cusp of lockdown last year, they crashed a Purim party in Williamsburg and danced with Trump-loving Hasidim. Watching them, I couldn’t always tell if they were being judgmental or celebratory. In the best episodes, Simonian has a subdued joy at being around chaos, like an anthropologist excited to join in the customs of a foreign land. 54, turned out to be fairly tame - less guerrilla than some of the most memorable Sidetalks. While working, they commune through a mix of whispers and what seems like ESP, never losing their cool no matter how many times it takes Mo to nail the line. Byrne, who resembles a Kennedy and speaks in the octave of Sam Elliott, is the cameraman, but beyond that, it would be hard to pick apart who’s really doing what - they often finish each other’s sentences. Simonian, the one with a shock of black Timothée Chalamet hair, is the straight man on-camera.
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“If I don’t get your vote, don’t let me find out who you are, ’cause I’m comin’ ova there, I’mma crack yoo ova tha head with a loaf of sem-o-leeena!” Mo yells into the camera as he paces the length of Mulberry Street. On this particular afternoon, their subject is Lil Mo Mozzarella, a proudly Italian aspiring TikTok star who has taken his ostensible mayoral campaign to the streets of Little Italy with his Moncler puffer unzipped and his velvet track pants shimmering. You might meet a man named Jesus humping a tree in Central Park or a foulmouthed child talking about women with big butts. Each post begins with the familiar bing-bong sound of the subway’s “Stand clear of the closing doors” recording, but after that, you might find the sloe-eyed Simonian deadpanning into the camera as a disturbed woman screams about Jezebel’s children. It’s not what you might expect if you’ve ever seen an episode of their raucous one-minute Instagram show, Sidetalk. The Saturday in January is crystalline and frigid, but the two NYU students arrive with open puffer jackets, no gloves, and a “Let’s get right down to business” competence that makes it possible to forget they’re only 19.
on the dot, just as they said they would. Trent Simonian and Jack Byrne show up at 12:30 p.m. Photo: Jamel Shabazz for New York Magazine Sidetalk’s Trent Simonian and Jack Byrne with their frequent guest Spider Cuz.
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