‘My whole thing was, I want it to be janky,” says Boots Riley, talking about the ramshackle imperfection of his show I’m A Virgo. “Everything is too smoothed out. You make it a little janky and jangling and people feel it more.” Among this year’s slick small-screen dramas, Riley’s I’m a Virgo sticks out like its main character: a 13ft-tall Black teenager. The premise alone is outlandish enough; what Riley and his team do with it, and how they do it, make I’m a Virgo one of the most bracingly original things on our screens this year or any other. And one of the most revolutionary: the show culminates in a full-on, top to bottom critique of capitalism – in a show streaming on Amazon. How did he get away with it?
Riley, a former musician and activist, already made a name for himself with the 2018 movie Sorry to Bother You – a similarly surreal satire of corporate commerce led by Lakeith Stanfield. “People knew what they were getting into, right?” he says on a video call from Oakland, California, recalling when he pitched his new idea to various streaming platforms. With his mutton-chop sideburns and giant red felt hat, the 52-year-old could be a lost nephew of Sly Stone. “I don’t think they knew everything, but they knew it’s me. They know the thing is crazy.”
The anti-establishment politics was one hurdle; another was how to actually make a show with a giant character, Riley admits. Cootie (played by Jharrel Jerome) is raised in seclusion by his regular-sized aunt and uncle, who fear how the outside world will respond to a supersized Black kid – with justification. The naive teen is welcomed by some local youths, but also prompts fear and hysteria, not least from the neighbourhood superhero: a hi-tech vigilante in an Iron Man vein with shades of Elon Musk (played by a hilariously sullen Walton Goggins), who flies around in a robotic suit, enforcing law and order.
This isn’t the half of it. Cootie’s love interest, Flora (Olivia Washington), lives at super-speed, so the entire world appears in slow motion to her – which makes for one of the weirdest love scenes ever filmed. There are also comic-book characters, cults and TV shows, not to mention cameos from the likes of Elijah Wood, Danny Glover and even the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (voicing a cartoon baby). Rather than glossy CGI, all of this is rendered with a charming old-school jankiness: using models, miniature and giant props, forced perspective, dolls, puppets, stop-motion animation. It’s a triumph of lo-fi craftsmanship.
“Whenever Jharrel was on screen, he was never looking at the other characters, and vice versa,” says Riley. “There were times when he got really frustrated, like: ‘I’m looking at this piece of tape on the ground and I’m supposed to do this emotional thing.’”
Luckily, the cast got along, and they were hanging out at all hours of the night, every single night. They were working in New Orleans during the Covid pandemic, so they were already isolated. “It was like theatre camp for them,” he says. “They’re singing songs, practising dance moves. So when they got on set, they knew each other really well.”
As for the 12-minute love scene – which is surprisingly sweet and tender, as Cootie and Flora work out how to get off together given their incompatible anatomies – the actors actually filmed their parts entirely separately. “You usually hear during sex scenes about trying to empty the room of as many people as possible. But you’ve got puppets, you’ve got dolls, you’ve got people to adjust the dolls, all that kind of stuff. So it couldn’t get that intimate. When you understand the difficulty they had, maybe that played into the awkwardness of it.”
I’m a Virgo could really be seen as a subversive superhero show, and in that capacity it has proved uncannily prophetic, given the fortunes of the Marvel franchise and Musk this year. Goggins’s character, simply named Hero, is a self-absorbed entrepreneur who glorifies himself in his own comic books, and sets up Cootie as a monstrous adversary. But as Cootie’s politically aware colleague Jones explains, via a rousing sermon, Hero is part of the bigger problem of capital, labour, violence and law enforcement – he’s “a tool that helps capitalism run smoothly”.
There’s an element of autobiography here. “When I was 12, I may have had a psychotic break,” says Riley. “I was such a big comic-book fan that I was like: ‘I can be a real-life superhero.’ I was involved in gymnastics. I was doing karate classes, I was working out.” It didn’t quite pan out that way, he says, stroking his Wolverine-like sideburns. “When I was 14, I started getting involved in radical politics, supporting people who were organising the Watsonville cannery workers’ strike [a landmark labour dispute of the mid-1980s]. And by the time I was 15, I’d joined the Progressive Labor party, a communist organisation. I had the feeling that this was the closest version to being a superhero there is.
“When you’re a kid, you’re like: ‘Why are there homeless people?’ And nobody really has an answer. Then all of a sudden, you join an organisation that is like: ‘There are homeless people because this happens, and this happens. Here’s a way to change it.’ In retrospect, that’s probably what I was looking for in comics: people that had control of the world around them: people that could make a difference.”
Activism and local politics ran alongside music in the 90s and 00s, when Riley founded hip-hop/funk/punk band the Coup, and worked with the likes of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Jello Biafra and Billy Bragg.
“In my work, I’m often taking risks that I know some people will like and some people won’t like. I developed that in hip-hop. At first, you’re like: ‘Do these demos sound like they’re real? Like they’re professional?’ You’re saying: ‘OK, hip-hop has these definitions, and these other things I like, they fall out of that definition, so I got to cut those off.’ And at some point, I realised that I had to just put all my passions into it. The most important thing was what people felt when they felt I was passionate, because that was a connection to it.”
The irony of I’m a Virgo’s anti-capitalist message being platformed by a corporate behemoth like Amazon is not lost on Riley, of course. But singling it out as the problem is futile, he says. “One capitalist gets pointed out as if ‘That’s the evil one,’ and everybody else kind of gets off. In reality, Amazon has done what many corporations do: they’re union-busting, they have wage issues, all of which I encourage people to organise on the job to fight. But Disney also has [had issues with] sweatshops and child labour and union-busting. So I don’t know how I would ever be able to escape it.”
Riley also points out that the biggest shareholders in Amazon, bigger than Jeff Bezos, are three investment funds: Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street – which now own approximately 21% of Amazon; Bezos, the largest individual stakeholder, owns about 12%. And that these three funds are also the largest shareholders in Netflix and Disney. Is there a danger that Riley is only sticking it to the establishment on its own terms? At the end of the day, is he like I’m a Virgo’s Hero, another “useful tool that helps capitalism run more smoothly”? “The only way to not do that is to be involved with a revolutionary organisation that is fomenting class struggle,” he says. “I’m not only interested in opening up people’s minds; I’m interested in making people feel like there is something they can connect to, and actually get involved with.” He cites the part Sorry to Bother You played during a wave of US labour disputes in the early 2020s. “People kept calling me and saying stuff like: ‘We’re worried about being able to organise our workplace.’ And we did an event where we showed Sorry to Bother You, and everybody voted to strike. That happened a couple of dozen times … All the politics I’ve put forward are about people totally changing the economic system we’re in.” He plans to screen I’m a Virgo in a similar way at events; in total it is only three hours 15 minutes long, he points out – shorter than Killers of the Flower Moon.
Will we see I’m a Virgo’s characters again, given the acclaim the series has received? Is there a season two on the horizon? “I definitely have other things in the pipeline,” says Riley. “Whether this is the last we’ll see of this world will be figured out very soon.” Either way, in a content-saturated landscape, I’m a Virgo found a way to distinguish itself, and proved that imagination and artistry are more important than budget. Hopefully, it has also shown other showrunners how bold and confrontational the small screen can be – especially when its goals go beyond simply entertainment.
• This article was amended on 26 December 2023. Sorry to Bother You was released in 2018, not 2008 as an earlier version said.
