Radically Rethinking the Superhero

Rapper and activist turned filmmaker Boots Riley brings his singular, provocative vision to prestige TV with the new series I'm a Virgo

- ERIC SULLIVAN

GROWING UP, BOOTS RILEY BADLY WANTED TO become a superhero. Like, a real one. Scrawny and nerdy and on the edge of adolescence, he started to hone his craft-swinging nunchucks, throwing stars, sneaking into and out of rooms without detection. "Had I stayed on that track, I probably would've become a cop," he says over Zoom one recent afternoon. Instead, he discovered Prince, fell into music, fronted the rap group the Coup for some two decades, and then, in his late 40s, suddenly emerged as an in-demand movie director.

Riley, now 52, is talking from his Oakland home, an early-20th-century Victorian fittingly built by a pioneer of art photography. Riley bought the place four years ago, after the success of Sorry to Bother You, his screenwriting and directing debut. An outrageous black comedy set in the world of telemarketing, the movie offered a blistering indictment of capitalist greed wrapped in a surreal bow. And to anyone who saw the film, it marked the arrival of a singular new voice in cinema. The movie went on to earn six times the roughly $3 million it had cost to make, which presented Riley with opportunities.

What, Hollywood wanted to know, would he like to make next?

A superhero story, as it turns out. But not one that the average Marvel fan will recognize.

Less a genre homage and more a send-up, his new seven-part limited series I'm a Virgo (which drops June 23 on Prime Video) is about a 13-foot-tall Black teen from Oakland named Cootie who, after having spent his life in secrecy, ventures into the world for the first time. Riley may have had mainstream money to work with this time around, but that doesn't mean he made a mainstream product. Wouldn't have even known where to begin.