Boots Riley and Tze Chun on Hollywood Diplomacy and Writer’s Room Morale

Tze Chun and Boots Riley of “I’m a Virgo.” When asked about the critical reception to his new series I’m a Virgo , Boots Riley responded, “There’s a few people hating it, so that feels good.” The 52-year-old musician, activist, and director has never been afraid to take risks that may jeopardize his commercial appeal. His directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You , was a surrealist, anti-capitalist comedy following a Black telemarketer in Oakland who begins faking a white person’s voice and is subsequently sucked into an outlandish corporate conspiracy. Like that film, I’m a Virgo uses magical realism to advance its thesis about race and poverty in America. Its protagonist is Cootie, a 13-foot-tall Black teenage living in Oakland who, when we meet him, is determined to break out of his sheltered existence. He lives with his adoptive parents, who’ve kept him in hiding, where he’s made to read for 10 hours a day. “People are always afraid, and you’re a 13-foot-tall Black man,” explains an acquaintance. But his efforts to transcend these confines and embrace the real world put him at odds with his former idol, a vigilante committed to upholding the status quo. Shortly after the show premiered, Riley hopped on a call with the writer-producer Tze Chun to chat about the importance of morale in a writer’s room, preserving your integrity in Hollywood, and how they fought, together, to retain Riley’s bold, allegorical vision for I’m a Virgo. BOOTS RILEY: What’s up, Tze? TZE CHUN: Hey, Boots. CHUN: I’ve been traveling, so I haven’t talked to you. How are you feeling now that the show’s been out for a couple weeks? RILEY: It’s weird because we’ve been working on this for years. I had the idea at the end of 2018, but I started writing the pilot at the beginning of 2019. And I’m used to stuff that’s a little more polarizing than this. I have this thing in my gut where if there’s not enough people hating it, I’m like, “Did I do something wrong?” And there’s a few people hating it, so that […]

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