This Friday brings the debut of what’s destined to go down as one of the year’s best TV shows; Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo.
The offbeat coming-of-age story centers on Jharrel Jerome’s Cootie, who deals with the typical trials and tribulations of teenage life, albeit with the noticeable difference that he’s 13-feet tall and has spent his entire upbringing being sheltered from a world that may not be ready to accept him quite yet.
Things take a turn when the hulking teenager makes his first-ever friends, with Allius Barnes’ Scat and Brett Gray’s Felix helping to open Cootie’s eyes to what lies beyond his backyard for better or worse. Riding a wave of critical acclaim that’s seen it secure a perfect 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, I’m a Virgo is shaping up to be unmissable when it lands at the end of the week.
Prior to the seven-episode series’ release, We Got This Covered had the chance to speak to Barnes and Gray about their experience, covering their initial reaction to reading the scripts to the dynamic they created on set both in and out of character, which you can check out below.
It would be an understatement to say the show deals with a lot of genre elements from comedy to social satire via drama and thriller – which often happens all at once in the space of the same scene – so what were your initial reactions to the scripts and realizing just how crazy of a ride it was going to be?
Brett Gray: It’s so funny!
Allius Barnes: I read the scripts, and I immediately,,, like, the young person in me just focused on all the fun things are happening. But through the process of filtering, I gotta say, I really learned a lot. You know, I learned a lot about what’s going on in the world, I learned a lot about what’s going on with us specifically, like black people. It was very educational, which is something you don’t always expect; you expect to learn something, but not not as deeply related to yourself as an individual. So yeah, that was my takeaway from this process.
Brett Gray: Totally. I hate reading scripts! I just, it’s one of those things that bothers me so much. It feels kind of like homework. And so when I get something like this, I can already tell that I’m really in love with the project, because I could not stop. I just wanted to know what was going on the next episode, and what happened with what, and all these images that I was getting, I was just like, “What am I even reading?” It felt like even each episode was its own little mini movie, I don’t even know how far apart some of them are from each other. It’s really awesome to see a show that gets to blend genre with sort of like a commentary on our social climate, with fantasy, with culture, with comedy, and drama, and family. It’s just kind of everything at once, which I need to finish the script because it’s so hard for me!
Allius Barnes: And executed beautifully.
Brett Gray: Yeah, it just screams off the page. And then the execution is almost completely different than the script. So it’s like it’s like a discovery process.
There’s an easy chemistry between Felix, Scat, and Cootie – between all the cast really – was that an easy rhythm to get into during rehearsal and shooting, even though there’s a lot of effects and perspective work required to get the three of you guys into the same scene together?
Allius Barnes: I think I think it was fairly easy. I mean, off-camera we were, it was pretty goofy, honestly! Earlier, like they had to tell us, “Okay, pull it back a little bit.” It’s still at work, you know? It’s stuff like that. So I think, yeah, that made it fairly easy, for me personally.
Brett Gray: Totally, there was really two shows. It’s like the show we filmed, and then all of us off-set, and how we would interact with each other. And so I feel like it was a perfectly easy, we didn’t have to work on chemistry. We actually had a rehearsal, and we did a few scenes, and we kind of got together and at the end I think Boots was like, “Yeah, so we got it, you guys go get dinner!
I’m a Virgo premieres on Prime Video this coming Friday, June 23. You can check out our review here, as well as our exclusive interview with executive producer Michael Ellenberg.