Boots Riley’s Anti-Capitalist Revolution Will Be Televised

When Boots Riley was 12 years old, he wanted to be a superhero. 

Growing up in the Eighties in East Oakland with a civil rights attorney father, the younger Riley was drawn to a different version of justice. He remembers losing himself in comic books — he loved Daredevil, and anything with ninjas — and coming away determined to make “caped crusader” a career path. 

“I was in serious gymnastics, martial arts, throwing stars, doing nunchucks. I was practicing sneaking into rooms silently,” he recalls, some 40 years later, over lunch in Oakland on a warm afternoon. “It was, How can I realistically make this happen?”

Luckily, he says, two other interests derailed those plans. First, he discovered Prince, and decided he wanted to be like him instead. Then, when he was 14, he got into community organizing. (He first got hooked when a youth organizer, a friend of his dad’s, stopped by the house with some teenage girls and asked if he wanted to go to the beach with them — but first they were headed to support the cannery workers’ strike in Watsonville.)

“And it was only after learning about organizing that I realized, ‘Oh, what I wanted to be, with that superhero thing, was a cop,’’ says Riley. “And that’s what I would have turned into.” 

Imagine, for a moment, the alternate universe in which Boots Riley never became a rapper, writer, filmmaker or activist — never released windows-down, funk- and punk-infused hip-hop anthems that explicitly call for class war, with titles like “5 Million Ways to Kill a C.E.O.” — and is instead a charismatic 52-year-old employee of the Oakland Police Department. If it feels like you just ripped a hole in the space-time continuum, that will give you one-tenth of an idea of just how fantastically, compellingly weird his latest project, I’m A Virgo, really is. 

Watching it, one definitely gets the sense that Boots Riley has broken through something. After nearly three decades as the frontman of The Coup, one of hip-hop’s most outspoken underground acts, he hasn’t just emerged earthside. He’s careened into space, forged a black hole where he writes down the craziest shit he can think of, and then various suits in boardrooms actually fund and distribute it. If anyone took the success of his debut feature, Sorry to Bother You, for a fluke, I’m A Virgo makes it clear Riley has actually taken up residency in a galaxy where Hollywood’s normal laws do not apply.

The series’ first season, which dropped on Amazon Prime June 23, consists of seven episodes that follow Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), a 13-foot-tall teenager who’s been raised hidden away by his protective aunt and uncle, passing the time with superhero comic books, until he breaks free at 19. What he discovers outside is Oakland, in all its idiosyncratic charm. He makes friends, smokes weed, eats fast food. He goes to a sideshow, dances at a club, and falls in love with a girl named Flora (Olivia Washington) who’s got some charming idiosyncrasies of her own. 

He also — because this is a Boots Riley joint — develops a political and social consciousness, through a series of events that interrogate the medical-industrial complex, the power company, real estate tycoons, law enforcement, the fetishization of young Black bodies in entertainment and advertising, and more. 

In other words: It’s funny, bizarre, and the most blatantly anti-capitalist messaging you’ve ever seen on TV. But to Riley, all entertainment has a worldview. We’re just not used to seeing this one on screen. 

May 2022. A young girl and her father amble up an Oakland sidewalk — at the edge of a neighborhood that, if you were here in the Eighties, you might know as “The Twomps” — and encounter a blocked-off intersection: It’s the second-to-last day of shooting for I’m A Virgo. (The studio rejected Riley’s pitch to shoot entirely in Oakland, despite his promise that he could keep costs down with local connections. The show shot mostly in New Orleans, but squeezed in a final week here.) 

They’re about to film a block party scene. E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go” blares while smoke rises from a barbecue; a tech sets up a bounce house. On a truck bed, casually guarded by a puppeteer, lies a massive, movable, silicone hand, complete with lines in its palm and a smattering of hair. The girl stops and stares, wide-eyed, until the puppeteer asks if she wants to try moving the hand using its levers. 

Of course she does. Everyone does.

“My jaw was to the floor,” says Jerome, of the first time he heard Riley’s plan. The director reached out to him by personal email (subject line: “13-foot Black man in Oakland”), then pitched Jerome over a breakfast meeting with a briefcase of visual aids: figurines of Cootie, other characters, and a miniature car. Riley was committed to old-school practical effects, he explained, which might be challenging for Jerome, because he’d be acting with miniature sets.

But Jerome, who had been entranced by Sorry to Bother You, said the gig was a no-brainer: “I was like, ‘Boots. Yes. Please let me do this with you.’” By the time the puppeteers were actually scanning his body to make a realistic 13-foot silicone doll, none of it had become any less weird — but for Jerome, that was the point.

“I signed up for the idea that this is so creative and different, and something we haven’t seen beautiful Black faces doing,” says the actor, who lends Cootie a sweet, wide-eyed wonder as the character discovers life outside his house. Jerome tapped into experiences when he’s felt childlike — at the Emmys, for example, surrounded by his idols — to conjure Cootie’s awe at his first fast-food burger, or a pretty girl.

“It’s a project that has no boundaries, and I think that pushes a certain needle forward for a lot of artists,” says Jerome; as an actor/rapper, he also admires Riley’s multi-hyphenate path. “I hope it inspires more writers and directors and producers to step outside the box. I think that’s what a pioneer and an innovator does.” 

In the buzz following SXSW, the visuals made for the biggest headlines, and it’s easy to see why. In a sea of CGI-driven blockbusters, Riley’s world feels warm and human; it’s a thrill to look at, in part because of its occasional clunkiness. Forced-perspective shots do the heavy lifting, in tandem with intricate, hand-painted puppets and miniature sets courtesy of the practical effects studios Amalgamated Dynamics (Alien) and 32 Ten (Jurassic World and Star Wars). Virgo’s main non-human players include three different 13-foot Cooties and 13 miniature versions of other cast members. 

Asked if anyone showed up for the first day on set, saw the puppets and went, Wait, what the hell did I agree to?, Riley says “almost everybody.”

“Not in a put-off way, but there was a lot of, ‘What? You’re doing this?’” says Riley. Mike Epps, whose deadpan delivery steals scenes as Cootie’s retired-musician uncle, was especially creeped out by his half-size familiar: “He was serious about it, like, ‘I need to know where that thing is at all times. I need someone to take a picture of it every night so I know it’s OK.’”

For others, the sheer ambition of the project was thrilling: Riley wasn’t on set the day Denzel Washington (father to Olivia) visited, but he’s told the actor looked around at the scale of the thing, with its subversive indie spirit but audacious execution, and became emotional. 

“I heard he had tears in his eyes,” says Riley. “He was like, ‘They never let us do this.’”

So, yeah: the literal sight of this show is astounding — and that’s not even getting into the long, anatomically dubious sex scene, nor the animated TV-show-within-the-show, with voice work by Slavoj Žižek and Juliette Lewis. 

Still, when the credits roll, it’s the explicitness of I’m A Virgo’s agitprop that lingers, and contributes most to the feeling that you’ve just witnessed a high-wire act. In a handful of segments that Riley calls “psychic theater,” Cootie’s organizer-friend Jones (Kara Young) monologues point-blank about capitalism as an exploitative pyramid scheme and crime as a racist social construct, while dark Schoolhouse Rock-esque cartoons illustrate her speeches — faceless bodies forming geometrical, sociopolitical shapes in the sky.

Is it subtle? No. Is it astonishing, entertaining, and a bit disorienting to watch these ideas, which have formed the basis of Riley’s independent music and radical activism for decades, delivered to the masses via a TV show with a $53 million budget on Amazon Prime? Indeed. It feels, at times, like the work of someone who’s not sure they’re going to get another shot at this: Time to leave it all on the floor. 

But Riley says he’s never thought like that. “I do have those ideas, but they’re more about death,” he says casually. “Like, I might die, and this would be the last thing I ever made, so it better be good.” 

He certainly hasn’t had time, nor reason, to think about work drying up. Over a two-hour conversation, he excitedly outlines three more scripts he’s sold, two of them set to begin filming within a year. They’re all part of what Riley is calling a “cinematic album” — seven or eight projects with similar aesthetic and thematic threads. 

He’s also not done with music, and plans to release a few singles over the next year or so. 

“There’s a lot of optimism in the songs that I make … and without doing those songs, I get really depressed,” he says. “So I’ve realized I have to make music. But I also have to feel like it’s doing something, and the amount of people I can reach with films — it’s just so many more people.” 

Film has also been easier in some ways: this project is unmistakably the result of Hollywood courting him. Within days of Sorry to Bother You’s premiere at Sundance 2018, he was approached by Michael Ellenberg, head of the indie studio Media Res — he brought The Morning Show to Apple TV+ and the 2021 Scenes From a Marriage to HBO — who pitched Riley on the idea of a series. 

“TV is not my first love,” admits Riley, who studied film at San Francisco State University. But he was game. After landing the deal, he signed up for the whole kitchen sink of streaming services to study; he hadn’t had any of them in years.

Amazon acquired I’m a Virgo in 2020. While Riley has said the streamer might not have been his first choice, he also says there was little pushback from execs about the script’s more radical elements.

“I don’t think anybody wants to go down in history as being the executive that said, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’” says Riley. There may be, however, a few lines that are the result of him telling an actor what to say right before calling “action.” In one instance, when a bit Riley loved was on the chopping block, he called in an unexpected celebrity cameo as a way to safeguard it.

Still, he resists the notion that his work is more message-laden than any Marvel blockbuster. Superhero movies are “used to tell us a narrative about the world,” he says: about the military, about inequality, about good guys and bad guys. (The Virgo superhero character, played with deranged glee by Walter Goggins, does not turn out to be such a good guy.) 

It’s not just superhero movies. In the midst of the biggest wave of work stoppages since the 1970s, Riley notes, labor unions and strikes are almost nowhere to be seen on screen. (This conversation took place before the start of the WGA strike.) And: “I’ve never seen so many Black women police chiefs [on screen] as I have in the past four years,” he says. “That’s not just ‘representation.’ It’s ‘The police force isn’t sympathetic. How do we write a character that helps [the viewer see] they should side with the police?’”

Of course, he says, that might not be intentional, or even conscious. Writers look around at the world and write their version. 

“I think normally, what is able to be said about work like mine is that it wouldn’t sell, and they can’t say that with me right now,” he says. Sorry To Bother You made over $18.3 million against a production budget of $3.2 million. 

“At some point they might be able to say that. But right now? That’s not a thing anybody can say.”

There are 20 minutes to showtime inside San Francisco’s CGV theater. It’s April 2023, and I’m A Virgo is the closing-night event at the San Francisco International Film Festival, with two screenings, a Q&A, and an after-party. Riley’s wife, the musician Gabby La La, and two of his kids are here, as are collaborators from the local film scene. (As co-founder of the new Oakland nonprofit Cinemama, Riley is passionate about building infrastructure to help Bay Area filmmakers stay here instead of having to move to New York or L.A.)

Surely some of the people here have no personal connection to Riley, but you wouldn’t know it from the chatter. A lot of folks in the Bay think of him as a friend, or as family. Or they’re actually family. “Is Boots around?” a guy in line asks a theater employee. “I’m his cousin.” 

Among the collaborators here tonight are Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, aka Tune-Yards, whose engaging, vocal looped-and-layered score beautifully complements I’m A Virgo’s oddball visuals. The show marks the Oakland duo’s second collaboration with Riley: after they met about a decade ago, Sorry to Bother You became their first time scoring a film, period. Garbus says they recognized something special in each other from the jump. 

“Sometimes when people say they want Tune-Yards to score something, they mean they want us to make ‘The Bizness’ over again, or they want us to write ‘Water Fountain’ over again,” she says. “But with Boots, I had the feeling that he was like, no, I want all the weird of you.”

For Virgo, Riley reached out before the script was even done, and sent the pair a jumble of unexpected references — carillon bells; the 1956 Japanese film Street of Shame, with music by the avant-garde composer Toshiro Mayuzumi; Cape Fear (“horns, rather than feel”). For the last year or two, whenever he was in town, Riley came over after their infant son was asleep to listen to their progress and weigh in.

Some musicians might find that level of involvement stifling. But Garbus and Brenner say the relationship has been an energizing force. 

“I think that indie-pop, Pitchfork-y world of the mid-2000s that Tune-Yards came up in — at a certain point I began to feel constricted as an artist,” says Garbus. “And just to be around Boots and be part of his creative universe has opened my mind, and made me remember, ‘Oh, yeah. Tune-Yards started as a project that I wanted to be, like, this is what I’m not hearing in pop music.’ It’s reinvigorated my sense of curiosity and inventiveness, and wanting to do things that have never been done before.”

She’s in good company. Riley has a way of making people feel like they can do, and be, anything they want. Watching him make the rounds after the screening, it’s a tiny bit funny that a person interested in dismantling the concept of heroism and idol worship in favor of collective power has achieved this platform via, essentially, personal magnetism and a bullhorn. A skilled salesman and a natural showman, he is relentlessly interested in people, in their desires and motivations, in how they see themselves and why. It’s pointless to parse how much of that is pure curiosity and how much is organizer’s instinct, sussing out new angles for the next campaign: the effect on others is the same. Strangers share their work with him — amateur stand-up comic security guards, aspiring-rapper Uber drivers — and he listens.

A lot of his work is about figuring himself out, too. This might explain why he has trouble with the “coming-of-age” label for Virgo: It implies there’s a finish line. “All my characters are me,” he says. Riley thinks a lot about his early development, about those days when he wanted to be a superhero, his discovery of Prince, and of activism. 

“It’s all about the same thing,” he says. “Wanting your life to be important and meaningful and have a place.” Despite the increasing size of his paychecks and premieres, he feels most successful when activists tell him they got into organizing because of his music, or when he sees clips of The Coup’s songs getting people hyped at protests. He loves stories about workers quoting Sorry to Bother You when they vote to go on strike. 

Because ultimately, his music, TV and film projects are all in service of the same goal — helping folks realize they have more power than they think. In which case, true success will render his work obsolete.

“If we’re doing things right, then my art will be irrelevant at some point,” he says earnestly. “I’m making art that has to do with trying to build a movement that changes the way the world is. So maybe in 100 years, people will be like, ‘Why was he doing this? What was happening?’”

“That’s the contradiction, to me. I’m making stuff that I hope will last a long time. But I’m also hoping that people don’t get it at all.”