Jharrel Jerome interview: ‘I’m a Virgo’
“Funny enough, Boots sent me the idea through an email. So I woke up one morning in my hotel room to an email that says, ’13-foot-tall Black man in Oakland,'” remembers Jharrel Jerome about the initial pitch for the satirical series “I’m a Virgo” from creator Boots Riley. “That will get you up out of bed real quick. And a week later he came to my hotel and pitched the entire idea to me, and I was kind of blown away.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Jerome above.
“I’m a Virgo” stars Jerome as Cootie, a 19-year-old boy from Oakland, California, who happens to be 13 feet tall. After being kept isolated all his life by his protective aunt and uncle (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps), he ventures out into the world for the first time and discovers love, friendship, danger and inequality. But to create the illusion of a giant Cootie, Riley told Jerome, “We’re shooting practical. This is all forced perspective. We’re going to build miniature sets around you. We’re going to make a giant doll of you, and we’re going to pull all these tricks together so that the eye can believe that you’re tall.” When Jerome heard that, he “got more scared,” but “as an actor, that’s probably the most exciting thing you can do before you get a role is know that you’re going to enter a challenge that you have never been through before. So I was down.”
Using forced perspective did present a major acting challenge, though. Jerome was never able to look his co-stars in the eye during scenes with them. But when playing a character who feels alone and out of place, “it helped all the way.” For instance, for scenes set in Cootie’s room at home, “they built a small scale version of it and a large scale version of it. So for me, I was the only one in that small, tiny house” while his fellow actors were “in the big room just in-between takes laughing and having a good time and making jokes, and I gotta stay in my room and just wait for the next take. So that definitely fed into Cootie’s isolation and his loneliness on top of him not really understanding what’s going on ever.”
As for the 13-foot-tall Cootie they built for the shoot, “Everybody else was terrified of it … I don’t know if it’s an ego thing, but I was obsessed with it. I was like, this is big me, you know? I want to keep it. I want to bring it to my place.” It’s certainly not a typical experience for an actor. “You don’t ever think that there’ll be money put into a 13-foot-tall silicone wax version of you. Ever. So it definitely was like a gift.”
