“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 Here’s a 20-minute highlight reel.Sidetalk’s Trent Simonian and Jack Byrne with their frequent guest Spider Cuz.
“As soon as I saw that I was getting a positive response, I started planning Sidetalk for, like, the next year and a half, coming up with ideas, thinking about what to do, what direction to take with it,” he says. The hallmarks of Sidetalk are visible in the early Shark TV. The way Simonian brings out the humor in students, teachers, even school guards, or turns a banal fire drill into an adventure, seems to have set him up well for meeting unpredictable people on the streets of New York. (She added that he keeps in touch with her and that she’s proud of him.) Even when he was talking to the younger kids, he’d put them in the videos with a kind of empathy that was never mocking them,” she tells me.
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And he knew how to make videos that the student body connected with - which is harder than it seems.
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“Trent worked as a professional immediately.
His teacher Rachel Stowell says when he joined the class as a senior, he naturally fell into the role of producer.
At Malibu High, he honed his sense of humor in a similar man-on-the-street show called Shark TV, made for a film class. He says he had been thinking of coming to New York to make videos since he discovered Casey Neistat as a tween. This spring, New York did a great profile of Byrne and Simonian:
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