Jharrel Jerome doesn’t necessarily show it, but he’s nervous right now. We’re a few days out from I’m a Virgo’s premiere on Prime Video, and the actor knows this debut is a big one for him. It’s his first show since he won an Emmy for Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, and then somewhat inadvertently took a very long acting break. “I’ve still got about a week left of this three-year limbo I’ve been in,” he tells me. “After the next few weeks, I’ll hopefully be back in conversation—and people can remember that I exist.”

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In the time since we spoke, that wish seems to have come true. The brilliantly satirical I’m a Virgo stars Jerome as a sheltered 13-foot-tall young man named Cootie who decides to venture into his Oakland neighborhood for the first time—and any questions you may have about the bizarre premise or its singular execution can be answered by the fact that the wildly original filmmaker Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) serves as its creator. The series has received rave reviews across the board, with Jerome’s warm, earnest, surprisingly deadpan performance the center of much of the acclaim.

So, it’s another thrilling chapter for the 25-year-old actor, who first came to prominence in Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning Moonlight. With Steven Soderbergh’s Full Circle also on deck for Jerome, you could say he’s firmly back in the conversation. As he reveals in our long talk for this week’s Little Gold Men (listen or read below), though, you could argue he never left. This was always the plan.

Vanity Fair: From what I understand of your introduction to I’m a Virgo, you get an email from Boots Riley with the subject line, “13 Foot Tall Black Man from Oakland.”

Jharrel Jerome: Yep, exactly what I read.

Do you remember where you were when you got that email? What goes through your head when you just get this notification with that subject line?

The email started my day. It was the first thing I woke up to. I think I was in a hotel. I woke up, checked my phone, and went through my email. It was the first email I saw, from Boots Riley. “13 Foot Tall Black Man in Oakland.” [Laughs] I was dumbfounded, and also just confused. I didn’t know it was going to be a series or a film. It was just a concept that he threw at me. He said, “I need to meet with you,” and I was like, “I need to meet with you.” We sat down about a week later, and we chopped it up.

How did you get to talking about this project a little bit more deeply, beyond this premise and toward what you’d be working on together?

When we sat down a week later, we had a long conversation. There were a lot of different things to attack. My favorite part is that he brought this briefcase with him, and in the briefcase he had these little figurines of the characters. He had a giant Cootie doll, a little Cootie doll, and he had the car that Cootie would ride in. He sat there, and he showed me exactly how he would shoot it, which was forced-perspective. He said he was trying to work less with CGI, less with the special effects, and make it feel visceral and grounded and authentic. It would require me having to do some mental gymnastics, and work a little harder, because it’d be weird camera angles. “You’ll be working with miniature props sets,” he was telling me. You won’t really be looking at your scene partners in the eyes.” When he was saying this, this was all music to my ears. I’m like, a challenge? I love it. Give it to me.

What do you remember about seeing those miniatures for the first time? That’s got to be a new one for you.

I was just like, “Who is this guy? Who just took me to have lunch and has these little toys in front of me?” [Laughs] One of those moments I won’t ever forget. I was impressed at his detail and his care for the project. He moves with so much passion, and if you’re going to go and make figurines, and bring it to somebody that you want to pitch the show to—there’s just so much drive and hustle behind that. It was dope.

And there were also giant dolls of you hanging around the set, right?

Two of them—two gigantic, 13-foot silicone dolls of me. I had to go in for four hours and get a huge body skin. They made these two dolls because, like I said, the forced-perspective shooting required certain tricks. That was for all the over the shoulder shots. Anybody who did a scene with me was only acting towards that doll, and not me.

I would find that haunting, if there were just 13-foot versions of me hanging around.

Oh, I had a dream once about it. In the middle of shooting the show. These two dolls were in my apartment. They were pretty terrifying. It’s funny, because the resting face that the doll had was just this jaw-dropped, dead-eyed glaze. It was pretty terrifying. I always wonder what Boots’s dreams are like, because his brain, man.

I hadn’t gotten to see you do a lot of comedy before this. Obviously, this being Boots Riley, it’s not the broadest or most accessible necessarily, but this is a really funny show. Were you looking to get into something like that after some pretty intense dramatic work?

Yeah, the bar was set pretty high with my last performance, and that just made me hungry to do something that would challenge me in that way again…. I would love to be an actor that can show range, that can exhibit all kinds of different emotions in different ways. I think doing this so early on can help show that. Listen, I’m a funny guy. A lot of people personally in my life think I’m a very funny person, but you know what they say—the funnier you are, the more dramatic you can be, and vice versa. I definitely am comfortable in dramatic spaces, as a dramatic actor, but I want to get into comedy, and I want to do intelligent comedy like I’m a Virgo, and blend my dramatic skills with the comedic world. I do find it harder to do comedy. When I worked with Boots specifically, there’s a scene where I’m in the club for the first time, and it’s hilarious.

It’s so good.

I remember before we shot it, how funny I thought it was, and how funny I thought the lines were. For the first few takes, on top of having to not look at any scene partners, and sit next to these miniature speakers next to me—and pretend they were making music—I had to think about, How do I make this funny? How do I deliver these lines as funny as Boots wrote it? I remember stressing certain lines the wrong way. I was just so in my head. Boots came up to me, and he was like, “Jharrel, don’t make it funny. It’s already funny.” That’s all it took for me. I didn’t try to make it funny, I tried to make it Cootie.

That’s what you’re tasked to do a lot of the time—you have characters reacting to you in these really outrageous ways. You didn’t have the scene partners, but were you able to see the way that a lot of your very funny co-stars were reacting to the character? Could you play off that in your head?

Definitely. We stressed rehearsal periods for sure. We wanted to make sure that we were connected. We had the lines said to each other face to face. We did that every scene, so that it was easier…. It was just added work for each moment, but it was great. Boots curating that type of vibe on set, where everybody could hang out, helped those moments where we weren’t together during the scene. I had an earpiece in my ear the whole time. If we were in separate rooms even, I’d have this earpiece lodged in, and I’d be doing the scenes just hearing them, but looking at dolls, and avoiding the camera. It’s crazy.

This is everything I would want from a Boots Riley production.

Everything! I’m like, “Man, you just took Sorry to Bother You and gave it to us on steroids,” and he just went, “Yeah.”

Your character is essentially coming into the world for the first time here. He’s lived a very sheltered existence. How did you work on his voice? It’s so specific, and you toe this line again, of pretty comic and very earnest.

I had a couple of conversations with Boots early on about Cootie’s voice, and where I originally wanted to go with it was Oakland, because he’s from there. Boots sent me a ton of Bay Area dialect things, and I was going to get into trying to use the Bay Area dialect. Then I thought, Cootie has never been outside. He’s in the Bay Area, but he hasn’t been in the Bay Area. He’s been in a Victorian home with his mom, who has a very delicate voice, and a very delicate way of speaking, and then his dad, who has this very—well, it’s Mike Epps. [Laughs] I wanted to figure out, if Cootie was growing up, who was he so inspired by vocally? What was the voice that was so inspiring for him? I think it would’ve been his mother. And to Boots’s surprise, I said The Hero [played by Walton Goggins] too. I think his obsession for The Hero probably started at a very young age, and if you notice, a lot of his quotes come from The Hero. Even when he is out with his friends, and he says something, and they look at him like, “Nobody says that,” he’s like, “I think people say that.” But it’s only because The Hero says that. I wanted Cootie to have this lighter tone to his voice, this naive, baby-ish voice that hasn’t really been beat up by anybody, or lied to by somebody.

In your fairly short career, you’ve been able to do some pretty amazing work with Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and now Boots Riley. Between those three, what are some things you’ve picked up just as an actor about filmmaking? They’re all very unique, and pretty distinctive in the way they do their work.

Like you said, they are all so different, and the way they create their projects is different, and so when you work with them, you can see how differently they move. I even worked with Steven Soderbergh, too, to add on to that. When I think of a director who holds the camera himself, [Boots] doesn’t direct the actors much. Then Ava will sit with me, and she’ll make sure I’m fully good to move on, or she’ll make sure that she understands the choices. She’ll even ask about, “What was that choice you just made?” That’s a whole different type of directing. Barry has this lax, cool energy about him, with his hat backwards. He’s like, “Man, you’ve got it. You work it, and then we’ll talk it.” It’s so inspiring to see these individuals have such a vision, and know how to captain that ship, and really do it. I’ve been lucky to work with captains of a ship, not just these lackadaisical directors who are like, “Whatever, man. We’re making a movie.” These are people who do passion projects.

After When They See Us came out, for which you very deservedly won the Emmy, I believe you filmed Concrete Cowboy and then, from what I could tell, took a few years off of acting. Is that what happened for you?

Not purposely.

Okay, that was my next question.

I definitely took a break, just not purposely. 2019 was an incredible year, and then 2020 was the worst year for all of us. Just at the height of everything going on, things just went to the ground. I had three projects lined up, to shoot throughout 2020. One of them is the project that I’m currently working on now, Unstoppable, that finally came around a full three years later. It was that first, and then when those projects went under, it was about finding the right project to do now, because there weren’t many projects at all.

My team and I got very serious in conversation about being picky and meticulous with what we choose, because now that everything’s so sensitive, we don’t know what the future is. We don’t know what can happen. I remember saying to them, “All I know is, I want to raise the bar, and challenge myself, even if that means sacrificing financially, and sacrificing a length of time not being able to work on a project.” I knew it’d be worth it in terms of longevity. Running for a paycheck now could have been great in the time, in terms of certain things I may have wanted to do, but longevity-wise, I think it would’ve slowed me down. If I can hit you with something like When They See Us early, then I need to prove that I can do it again.

And enter Boots Riley.

Like I said, these projects don’t come often. Then, Boots Riley doesn’t come knocking at your door every day with a genius idea like this. I count my blessings and I wait, and I’m patient, and I think it’s worked out for me. Now, although I do have a lot of people like, “Where are you? What’s going on? You won an Emmy, and then you left.” Those questions will be answered—not only answered, but I think people will be like, “All right, cool. He’s not only back, but he’s still working on the caliber that he’s trying to work on.”

Did it feel scary at all to hold that conviction? Obviously, it worked out that you did do that, because now you’re working with Soderbergh and Boots Riley. But there is this feeling, I think especially in Hollywood, of striking while the iron’s hot.

Yes, terrified. It wasn’t the best feeling. It’s not like I’m walking around, “Yep, not working.” It was scary and risky. Risky is the biggest word, but for three years now, I’ve been saying, “It’s going to be worth it” to myself. I’ve been saying it, and I’ve been very adamant about it. I believed in myself and the people around me, and it’s so great to see it pay off.

Let me ask you a little bit about being a Libra, in the spirit of the show’s title. Cootie says that, because he’s a Virgo, he’s ready to go on this big adventure. What about being a Libra has prepared you for this moment you’re talking about in your career?

The funny part of all of this, and the irony in all of this is, I’m not a sign person. [Laughs]

Me neither. It’s a big deal that I’m even asking you this!

All right, good, so we’re on the same page here. I have no quarrels with it—I just don’t have those apps or anything like that. So when I first got into doing the show, all I really learned about was Virgos. I didn’t even take the time to look up what makes me a Libra. But if you spend time in LA, everyone around you will tell you what you are, and they will tell you how you move, because they know so much about signs. [Laughs] Based on my knowledge of the people around me, I am a hopeless romantic, and I am someone who is very emotionally available, which can cause rifts because maybe it’s a little too much emotion.

So in terms of how it’s preparing me for my career, it’s not good that I’m a Libra. It’s not preparing me for what’s about to happen. I am definitely aware of just how I am as a person, though, and I have learned so much from my own mistakes. As I go into this next chapter in my life, I feel 20, 30, 40 times more grounded than I did back in 2019, when that shift happened for me the first time.

This interview has been edited and condensed.