One of the most unique and acclaimed TV shows of the year is on the horizon, with Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo coming to Prime Video this Friday, June 23.
Currently boasting a perfect 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, the offbeat coming-of-age drama finds Jharrel Jerome’s Cootie getting to grips with the real world, although the caveat is that things don’t come especially easy when you’re 13 feet tall and have spent your entire life shielded away from the public for your own protection.
Suffice to say, you won’t see anything like I’m a Virgo on the small screen, which is one of the main reasons why Michael Ellenberg was drawn to the project as an executive producer through his MEDIA RES company. During an exclusive chat with We Got This Covered, he explained what enticed him about working with a visionary like Riley, his most memorable moments along the way and much more, which you can check out below.
The earliest mention of MEDIA RES partnering with Boots Riley for a series came back in July of 2018, but a release date for I’m a Virgo was only confirmed last month, so how does it feel knowing that the journey is almost at an end?
Michael Ellenberg: It feels awesome. Yeah, everybody at MEDIA RES, we’re very committed to unique visionary projects, and filmmakers and artists like Boots Riley, and so sometimes it can take a minute for to go from beginning to fruition. And this was a process. This began with – for MEDIA RES not for Boots, but for me – it was, I saw the film [Sorry to Bother You] at Sundance that year, and was blown away by it, and chased Boots.
I was convinced that his sensibility, his aesthetic, his message would be incredible in series. And so fortunately, after a few meetings, he agreed, and we made a blind script deal. So when it began, we didn’t even have the idea, it was really just the intention to do something together. And then over time, he found this idea, we worked on the script for a long time, the pandemic happened that slowed everything down.
As you can see now, it’s handmade, it doesn’t capture just how unique and specific and personal this is to his vision and aesthetic. So everything needed to bake both in terms of what the writing and the storytelling is, and the filmmaking, just figuring out how to make something like this, when you don’t want to make it with VF and CGI. Sorry, there’s plenty of VFX, but there’s minimal CGI. People don’t even know how to do this kind of craft anymore, right?
So all of us, myself included as a producer, we had to relearn techniques that had been employed for a long time to pull this whole thing off. So there was both figuring out what the story and the message and the vision was, and then figuring out how to execute this thing. All which was a challenge, but an exciting inspiring one.
The show as completely unique, often absurd, sometimes dark, but always the end result of a singular vision. So were there any moments that stand out to you during development, reading the scripts, or production where you thought to yourself, “I can’t believe this is something that we’re actually making?”
Michael Ellenberg: The obvious answer is a lot! Yeah, a few times. To me, it’s because the script… Now you’ve seen the series, you know there’s a normal story about a 19 year-old guy coming of age, exploring the world for the first time. And then every episode or every other episode, the language of the show, something happens where you’re like, “What? Oh my god, is this right?”
So there’s both Cootie losing his virginity, I will say, that was both on the page and on the screen, something that was a novel and innovative, I’ll leave it for the viewer to witness it! I think all of the psychic theater material, you know, I don’t want to do a spoiler. But later in the season, when Jones has powers revealed in the journey they all go on together, is pretty off-the-wall, and figuring out how to make that was pretty off-the-wall. Some of the cartoon sequences, where you first think they’re tiny, just gags, and then you realize thematically, the language of them are quite relevant to everything else.
The pleasure reading the scripts was both that you’d laugh, and your jaw would drop. And then as a producer, you’re like, “Oh, my God, how are we going to pull this off?” So you both super enjoy, and then you’d have that moment of, “Okay, now we gotta go, like, who’s going to animate this thing?” So you have this kind of blended experience of both being off-the-wall inspired, and then you’d wake up being like, calling Boots and trying to figure out and begin the process of figuring out how to make the thing.
I’m a Virgo premieres on Prime Video this Friday, June 23, and you can check out our review of the series here.