Boots Riley is a multi-hyphenate – rapper, writer, director, musician, performer, and activist. His acclaimed follow up to Sorry To Bother You (2018) is a television show called I’m A Virgo. (Boots is actually a Taurus). His writing journey to his non-genre-conforming show follows thirteen foot Cootie (Jharel Jerome) as he leaves the family home, meets a group of political activist, and faces the trials and tribulations of the world.

Riley started his career in theater at the forty seat Black Repertory Group and political organizing. The idea for Virgo came to him little by little. “In drama class, we all voted to do a version of West Side Story. But we were in East Oakland, so we decided to call it East Side Story that it should have rapping instead of a dialogue,” says Riley.

In the absence of any writing volunteers for East Side Story, Boots, raised his hand, tapped into his experience writing short political skits and got to work. Soon after, Boots Riley started rapping and doing shows. People used to boo at his first shows, but he wasn’t deterred. He soon discovered that the audience actually loved him and some were yelling, “Boots.” But the shows weren’t perfect. “It forced us to get better. It wasn’t just the writing, but it was also the performance. It was all connected.” It is therefore no accident that Cootie meets a group of political activists when he transcends the relative safety of his home in I’m A Virgo.

After watching the West Side Story movie, Riley was inspired to attend San Francisco State University. “I was studying film there, but film wasn’t really writing. Writing for me was on a pad and paper. All my music and scripts that I wrote was just on a pad and paper if it was written.” Boots Riley made several stream of consciousness/ experimental films which still shade his work today.

While Boots was still in film school, his band landed a record deal and he progressed to making music videos. “I was doing the treatments for them and little by little, I’d sit in the editing suite with the directors until I eventually co-directed one of them.” Riley became known for his lengthy eight-minute music videos which contain detailed stories. “I tell these complete stories that are very descriptive.” At one point a music video director approached Boots about a movie he was working on about the black community, but he needed Boots’ help. “I don’t know how they talk so how about I write this story and you just write the dialogue,” says the director. He lent Boot his laptop and he got to work on the screenplay using Final Draft.

Boots’ screenwriting experience wasn’t as simple as filling in the scene descriptions with dialogue. “I started realizing the conversation took the leads to to a different place than the next scene in the outline the director already wrote. It didn’t make sense that this would happen.” This imbued Riley with the sense “that there had to be a real reason behind stories.”

Cootie – A Man Of Irony And Contradictions

The subconscious construction of Cootie’s character eventually came to Boots Riley over the course of his background. He didn’t deliberately set out to create an absurdist coming of age “comedy” (he refuses to assign a genre to Virgo) about a thirteen-foot nineteen year old banding with a group of activists. “I look at what are the contradictions and ironies in life.”

“Contradiction is what you’re doing when you analyze something. You’re saying this part works like this, but that other part works like that, and they push you like that and they push and pull against each other. And to me, those contradictions are part of what motivates life. A big part of irony is contradiction and a big part of comedy is irony; and a big part of drama is also irony. So that’s part of what motivates how we think about life and how we make sense of it.”

Boots Riley finally settled on the idea that Cootie was going to be very tall. “For some reason. I had the image of a giant black man walking down the street and what that would mean. And part of it was clear to me that what it meant to everybody looking at him was something totally different than what he might feel about himself. That’s the contradiction.”

We asked Boots why Cootie was a Virgo? “Because that’s the thing that seems that people would feel that you think is the most trivial thing. But if it’s important to that person, it’s not.”

Boots Riley. Photo by Corey Nickols/ Getty Images for IMDb

Despite being born in Chicago, Riley spent many years in Oakland which is the locale for I’m A Virgo. “I’m being as specific as possible in every scene and every interaction because I’m trying to attach to something real to the story,” adds Riley.

Boots never wanted a general sense of Oakland, but I’m A Virgo didn’t have to be set in Oakland either. “Where are they really? What’s really happening there around them? That all affects everything in the world that they live in.”

Cootie’s size is never explained or justified. All the audiences know is how it affects his life especially after leaving his over-protective adoptive parents LaFrancine (Carmen Ejogo) and his uncle Matisse (Mike Epps). After he leaves their watchful eye, he’s seeing things anew. “He sees the world differently. In this case, he’s seeing it for the first time and so it has this universe of opportunities to bring to him. All he knew of the world was this one small area and what was on television. So it brings hope. He sees things in himself and others that are useful and powerful.” This underpins his growth.

I’m A Virgo – A Surreal, Absurdist, Weird Trip?

Boots wasn’t excited to put I’m A Virgo in any genre box. “I refuse to try to look at that because I think that messes me up. I think that messes people up when they try to figure out what genre they’re in or what genre they’re writing for. Artistically, to be a good writer, you don’t want to be caught up totally in the end product. You want to be very much in whether something works or not.”

Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo) & Martisse (Mike Epps). Photo courtesy Amazon Content Services

Despite Riley’s genre classification aversion, breaking genre conventions still require some adherence to their tropes. “You’re speaking a language, so you want to be aware of what your viewers are looking for. But to me, I’m looking to do something different because I’m looking to keep people unbalanced as they’re watching. I’m looking to keep them on the edge so that they are engaged more.”

Boots Riley believes that if I’m A Virgo was classified as a comedy, “it starts limiting me in what I can do, because all of a sudden, when when I’m not doing that thing, it becomes something that’s wrong with it. I want to be able to flip it around a bit. So long as it feels real. But it can’t be at the expense of something unnatural that someone wouldn’t say.”

If you confine it to a single genre, “you often sacrifice the feeling that these are real people with the feeling that they’re making choices that you think they would make. And so it stops being funny. It could be a comedy. It could be a tragedy.”

Boots Riley adds that all the characters in I’m A Virgo have some origin in himself. “You are the person and your brain is the person puppeteering all the characters in your story. They’re acting based on how you think people act. For me, to make them all the characters more human, I have to put me in all of them and I have to have dialogues of me playing chess with myself.”

As an ongoing political and social activist, Boots Riley encourages his audience to become activists after watching I‘m A Virgo. “I want people to seek out organizations to be involved with and organize on the job. And part of doing that, is them seeing that there is a way to change things,” he concludes.