Boots Riley Says “Nope” To ‘I’m a Virgo’ Season 2
As Boots Riley releases his sophomore feature this weekend, the writer/director recently shot down hopes that he’ll return to television.
The I’m a Virgo creator offered a blunt “nope” to whether he’ll make a second season of his 2023 Prime Video series, which starred Jharrel Jerome as Cootie, a 13-foot-tall Oakland teenager who leaves his sheltered existence to experience the beauty and contradictions of the real world.
“The second season happens in your imagination,” he joked to ScreenRant. “I think we watch TV too much. So, you tell me what happens.”
Riley continued, “It’s hard to explain why, but we ended up having to cut 40% of the script. There was a whole penultimate episode that got cut out. There was another 20 minutes after that end that cuts out, and then there was stuff, like he actually did do all this sports stuff. There was more Lower Bottoms folks, there was more of that.”
Noting budget issues with the first season, Riley says he “would have got them to give me the money” if frequent collaborator LaKeith Stanfield was available to appear, but he was busy filming Disney’s Haunted Mansion (2023). Stanfield has starred in Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) and I Love Boosters, now in theaters.
“But the point is, then they kept being like, ‘We’ll just put it on the second season,’” explained Riley. “So, that’s why it feels like it needs a second season. But then when we sat down, I was like, ‘It just doesn’t feel right to do a whole second season because of things that really only work in the context of all that stuff.’
“They’re like, ‘That’s just how it always is done.’ But nah. It just doesn’t feel as impactful coming in like, ‘Now we’re starting with this thing that should have been at the end,’” he added.
Running for seven episodes on Prime Video, I’m a Virgo was created and directed by Riley, also starring Olivia Washington, Brett Gray, Kara Young and Allius Barnes. The show also featured appearances from Walton Goggins, Mike Epps, Carmen Ejogo, Kendrick Sampson, Elijah Woods, Joel Edgerton, Danny Glover, Juliette Lewis, Morgan Fairchild and more.
