Like a Virgo

Musician, activist, and Sorry to Bother You director Boots Riley comes to SXSW with I’m a Virgo.

BY ALEC BOJALAD

Boots Riley is not afraid to lead with magical realism. When the activist and lead vocalist of the influential hip-hop band The Coup first stepped behind the camera to write and direct 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, he presented audiences with something new right away. That film’s premise of Black telemarketer Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) learning to adopt his “white voice” to put customers at ease quickly gave way to something even stranger, angrier, and yes: more political.

Riley is seeking to pull off a similar trick with his next project, I’m a Virgo. The Prime Video series, starring Jharrel Jerome, has an equally ambitious premise: it’s about a 13-foot-tall Black man in Oakland, who’s a Virgo. But like Sorry to Bother You before it, that’s just a jumping-off point for all the surreal social commentary to come. Before I’m a Virgo makes its premiere at SXSW, Den of Geek talked with Riley about what he describes as the “second track” of his filmmaking era.

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Where did this idea come from?

I had a general idea: “13-foot-tall Black man in Oakland.” That was my pitch. Then I sat down to write. Obviously, it ends up being about a lot more than that. And it’s called I’m a Virgo because that’s what he thinks is important about himself, even though nobody else would come up with that in their top five important things about him.

When did the zodiac idea come in?

It started forming as I was thinking about writing the script. If I told you what the original title of the show was, it would reveal so much about where the show goes. But the whole point is that you’re this giant, people are thinking about you in the context of what they expect, what they’re afraid of, what they hope for, but they’re not thinking about you and how you feel.

Do you personally feel any kind of way about the zodiac?

I’ve been thinking about what I should say about this since it was coming up. I’ll just say this: our character does care about it, and that’s about it. It’s not something that I really subscribe to, but it’s something that I know is a part of human culture. I also thought, marketing-wise, we’ll get one-twelfth of the population watching the show. It’s like when people used to make songs for holidays: “It’s Thanksgiving, play this song every Thanksgiving.” That was this marketing trick.

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What was it like assembling the cast?

We’ve got Jharrel Jerome, Mike Epps, Walton Goggins, Carmen Ejogo, Brett Gray, Olivia Washington, Kara Young, and then we’ve got a bunch of cameos that are amazing. I hear all sorts of stories about other productions, but this cast really got along. They hung out. If you were looking for them when we weren’t shooting, they were all hanging out. We lucked out in that way. You can have a movie where rhinos that look like they’re pencil-drawn 2D-style bust through the room, and as long as you believe the character’s reaction to that, you buy it.

What was it like filming with so many practical effects?

It’s more fun to do. We had a forced perspective. A lot of the stuff is just Jharrel closer to the camera with halfscale objects because his character is twice as tall as he is. And then we have puppets. We have all sorts of stuff like that. It’s a lot more fun. You’re looking through the monitor, and what you see is what you’re going to get, as opposed to looking at a sea of green and then being like, “Oh, we’re going to make this look good.”

What do you think it will be like to premiere this at SXSW, which started as a music festival, given your musical origins with The Coup? SXSW is our favorite festival to perform at. Last time we performed there, I think, was 2014, and in five days, we did 20 shows. And none of my band was complaining. My experience of it is that the crowds are rowdier and more fun than other film festivals. That’s how I’m used to going to movies. We used to pick the movie theaters we went to based on the crowd that was going to be there.

I’m a Virgo premieres Saturday, March 11 at 5:45 p.m. at the ZACH Theatre.

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LOVE & DEATH

“I’m very attracted to you. Would you be interested in having an affair?”

Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) asks Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons) in the closing moments of the first teaser for HBO Max’s Love & Death. If there’s a better introduction to a David E. Kelley-scripted series, we’ve yet to hear it. The prolific TV writer and producer has covered the dark side of the American dream in everything from legal dramas (The Practice) to murder mysteries (Big Little Lies) to psychological thrillers (The Undoing). With his latest project, Love & Death, however, Kelley and his impressive cast are getting right to the heart of it all with a story of small-town true crime. Based on the real-life case of a Wylie, Texas axe-murder, Love & Death stars Olsen, Plemons, Lily Rabe, and Patrick Fugit as a handful of Texans confronting boredom, dissatisfaction, and a fatal attraction in the 1980s.

Swarm

“Murder. Sex. Music. This is not a work of fiction.” Thus reads the enigmatic full synopsis for Prime Video’s Swarm, a new show created by Atlanta mastermind Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, a playwright who contributed a script for Atlanta and was a supervising producer on Watchmen. The series follows Dre (Dominique Fishback), a superfan of a fictional Beyoncélike pop star, as her obsession takes her to dark, unexpected places. Swarm will have many big questions to ask about modern fandom, passion, and art. This is the first project borne from Amazon’s rich overall deal with Glover and also features none other than Malia Obama in its writers’ room.

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TV

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Demascus

Set in a not-too-distant future where therapy has been fully digitized, Demascus follows its title character (played by Okieriete Onaodowan) as he struggles to define himself as a 33-year-old Black man. This series will detail his journey of self-discovery as he learns how to balance his “enlightened” and educated self with his “hood” self through this new form of therapy. Demascus’ question of “Who am I?” is likely something most of us can relate to, and though his journey is a personal one, it evokes a feeling a lot of people have at different stages of their life. Unfortunately, Demascus was preemptively canceled by AMC and doesn’t currently have a place where it will stream or air after it premieres at SXSW. But hopefully, this genre-bending series will find a new home soon.

Beef

Beef is not about Steven Yeun and Ali Wong starting a cattle ranch together (though we’d watch that, too), but is instead about the explosive aftermath of an incident between their characters, Danny and Amy. The “beef” begins with road rage but won’t take long to escalate over the course of the 10-episode series, as we learn about the pressures of their daily lives and what led them to take this singular moment so seriously. Beef is a dark comedy full of twists and turns and surprisingly moving moments that let Yeun and Wong truly shine.

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American Born Chinese

This series is more than just a reunion for Everything Everywhere All At Once stars Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, and Stephanie Hsu, though fans of the movie will likely also connect with the show’s themes of identity, family, and belonging. American Born Chinese is an action-packed coming-of-age story that follows Jin Wang (Ben Wang) as he struggles with his identity. But not only does Jin have to contend with the messiness and drama of high school and discovering who he is as a person; he also becomes entangled in a battle between the gods of Chinese mythology after befriending a foreign exchange student from Taiwan.

Shatter Belt

In his follow-up to the 2013 cult-classic Coherence, James Ward Byrkit offers a collection of interconnected stories that look at the unsettling, surreal, and mind-bending aspects of reality. Starring actors like Abigail Spencer and Patton Oswalt, Shatter Belt is an anthology series that dives into the mysteries of consciousness, free will, desire, and so much more across its episodes. Topics covered include AI gone wrong, an apple that breaks the fabric of reality at a tech start-up, and a restaurant whose food reveals the true desires of its patrons.

The Big Door Prize

What would you do if you found a machine that could tell you your purpose in life? Would you eagerly accept the answers it gave or skeptically wonder how it could know so much about you and your potential? In The Big Door Prize, the residents of a small town have to ask themselves these same questions when a mysterious machine called “Morpho” appears within the town’s general store, promising to reveal each person’s true potential in life. Based on M.O. Walsh’s novel of the same name, The Big Door Prize is a heartfelt look at humanity and how even just the possibility of a new life can inspire both small and large changes within a person, such as quitting your job as a doctor to become a magician, or simply deciding to make behavioral changes to maintain your relationship. Normally this is the kind of thing that you might expect from an episode of Black Mirror, but it seems as though this series approaches this concept with wonder and curiosity rather than fear and terror.

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