'I'm A Virgo' Producer Michael Ellenberg Talks Working on 'Wild' and 'Joyous' Series (Exclusive)

By Brian Jones

I'm A Virgo has a chance to be one of the best television shows of 2023 as it has a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. But how would one best describe the series that's created and directed by Boots Riley? PopCulture.com spoke exclusively with I'm A Virgo producer Michael Ellenberg who revealed what fans can expect from a series about a 13-foot-tall Black man.

"A wild, joyous ride where you follow the adventures, first and foremost, of Cootie, played by Jharrel Jerome, he's an incredible actor, 13 foot tall young man who leaves his house basically for the first time, just around his 19th birthday," Ellenberg exclusively told PopCulture. "It's both a coming of age story and watching him achieve first love, first job, exposure to the world, all the kind of normal things. Then it's totally extraordinary."

Ellenberg continued: "The world views him as a menace, or at least the hero in our piece views him as a menace. The hero in this piece is actually the villain. Our lead and his friends, if he's going to really develop his own voice and be effective, can this community come together in a way that allows them to resist this force? Or will the hero conquer our gang? That's the kind of ride our folks are going. But it's playful, it's funny, it's like nothing you've ever seen before and you're in for kind of a wild, rocking, amazing time."

It's one thing to have a 13-foot-tall man as part of the show. But some of the things Cootie gets involved in make him more of a superhero trying to save his community. Riley's vision of I'm A Virgo is something that hasn't been seen before on television, and it's one of the reasons why Ellenberg wanted to work on the show. 

"When I saw Sorry to Bother You at Sundance, it blew my mind," Ellenberg said. "I'd never seen anything like it. No one's ever seen anything like it. So I chased the hell out of him and was like, you should do a show. Fortunately, at some point, Boots was like, 'You're right, I should.'"

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"Then the first idea he pitched was this idea. When you heard it, it was a coming age story you've never seen, it was an African-American story. It was sort of taking a core kind of experience, both of sort of bad and good that's not just African-American, really African-American male experience. I've never seen it kind of explored this directly in kind of a fresher manner, and a larger political idea all wrapped in one it. Nothing ever had been done like it. So it was both highly specific and universal at the same time. That balance is very rare to find."

All seven episodes of I'm A Vrigo are streaming now on Prime Video. 

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