On December 6, the 2023 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate 11 filmmakers, creators, and actors for their achievements in creative independence. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.

Hours away from attending the 33rd annual Gotham Awards as a nominee for both producing and acting in “I’m a Virgo,” an exuberant Jharrel Jerome, sitting inside The Beekman Hotel in New York, says “I’m ready to go do anything now.”

While he came off a couple of years out the spotlight with a whole surge of acclaimed 2023 projects like “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and Max series “Full Circle,” it is the aforementioned Prime Video satire helmed by Boots Riley that’s earned him the Performance Award at IndieWire Honors on December 6 in Los Angeles, and become the most transformative experience for him — though playing the 13-foot-tall Cootie did not actually require putting the 5-foot-8-inch actor into the taffy puller.

“A lot of mental gymnastics came into play. We shot forced perspective, so I didn’t look my scene partners in the eyes, not once,” said Jerome, beginning to list the challenges that came with his imaginative “I’m a Virgo” role. “In all my scenes I’m doing everything to a green X mark or to an iPad that’s lagging a little bit that has my scene partner’s face on it. And there was always an earpiece in my ear. So it’s almost like getting into a boxing ring with the best opponent in the ring and you have no idea how to box. It’s almost starting at square one with the acting. You learn all these things and you have to knock it all out when it comes to the way Boots shot this.”

He joked, “I’m ready to just go look at my scene partner in the eyes for my next project.”

Jerome began preparation for the comedy series, in which his gentle giant character starts off having been confined to his house by his parents for 19 years, as to not cause a scene on the already hectic Oakland streets, thinking it may be important to put some thought into what it’d feel like to loom over everyone. But he quickly figured out that that’d be the last thing on Cootie’s budding mind. 

“When we wake up, we’re so used to what makes us us and we go with it,” said the actor. “I gave up on the idea of maybe talking to tall people and seeing what it’s like to be tall and realized that it was more so about finding that naïveté, that wonderment, and that childlike essence that Cootie was pretty much forced to have.”

Being cut off from public life is most often seen as a traumatic experience, and “I’m a Virgo” leans into how it made Cootie different from everyone else emotionally just as much as physically, but it was important to Jerome and Riley that the protagonist not seem tortured by his circumstance.

“It was really about toeing the line of a human who does understand love, but has no idea of what it means. A person who’s been coddled and nourished, but when it comes to the real world is a baby again,” said the actor. Cootie may have had plenty of time to become well-read, but that has not made him any less socially inept. It was Jerome’s job to reflect Cootie’s genuine excitement about what people, places, and things lie beyond the scope of his childhood home. 

“For me it was more about the facial expressions. If you notice I’m making at least maybe a hundred facial expressions within a minute,” Jerome said. “If you look at [young] children, they’re always trying to get their point across visually, with their face, and with their body. They honestly don’t even make sense. They’re not saying anything really. They’re not saying words that compute, but we know what they’re trying to say just based [on] their physicality.”

Again, the technical aspects that go into making a character read as 13-foot-tall provided plenty of challenges, but the young star felt best embracing Cootie’s earnest lust for life. He recalls one day where Riley placed him into a tiny car, to be driven around the actual Oakland streets. “I was really just living in such a pure bliss moment of like, ‘Yo, I’m really doing this, a major Amazon show being wheeled around a car through Oakland and everybody in the streets are like, “Who the hell? What the hell is going on?”’” Jerome said, “I didn’t even know he was rolling, and I’m just looking around amazed. And he said, ‘Hey, Jharrel, we’re going to use what we just shot of you looking around because it was perfect.’”

While he does think he and Riley both having a musical background allows for kinship — Jerome having just dropped a “Trap Pack” EP on Wednesday, and the writer-director being best known as a member of conscious rap group The Coup prior to his film debut “Sorry to Bother You”— the “Moonlight” breakout has also just found the actor-director relationship to generally be a super important part of the creative process.

“[It’s] a driving force for how good the product comes out. So if there’s ever a moment where you and your director are just completely two different people with two different ways of being and two different understandings, there might be a tougher time on set,” said Jerome. “Whoever’s job it is to helm the entire project and then whoever’s the lead force in that project, they have to come together and be a dynamic duo, almost inspire and lead the rest of the production as well.”

Despite the heights he has reached in the medium, becoming the first Afro-Latino to win an acting Emmy, for his lead performance in the Netflix limited series “When They See Us,” Jerome’s preference for projects helmed by a single filmmaker makes finding work in television trickier. “Sometimes you’ll have a show with eight different directors on one show. I’ve experienced that only one time, and I’m not going to lie, I don’t want to experience it often,” he said. “Without sounding like a diva, no matter what, as an actor, you got to be told what to do and nobody likes to be told what to do. If there’s any dynamic in a relationship that’s off one week with the director, it might lead to the next week not trusting the next director. And feeling like, ‘Well, maybe our dynamic might be off too.’ That’ll all just deter what you’re doing with the role.”

At 26 years old, Jerome considers himself lucky to have already been directed by the likes of Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Steven Soderbergh, “so the reason I really pride the relationship between directors and actors is because I’ve seen it firsthand working with a director who really cares about an actor. And I’ve also seen firsthand working with a director who doesn’t care so much. I’ve seen it feed into how I perform.”

With “I’m a Virgo,” Jerome was able to come in on the ground floor, having partial say in who is cast after being made a producer. As the material became more of an expansive critique on capitalism, Jerome’s admiration for Riley and the character he’d provided him grew. “The beauty of Boots’ work [is] he can fit a million ideas into one minute, and so depending on who you are is how much you can grasp,” he said. “I learned a lot doing it from the political standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, from a human standpoint, [and] morally. Cootie being Cootie was fun to play because not often do you play a character where he just says ‘Yes’ all the time. He smiles through everything and he appreciates every single moment.”

While the actor, who is currently in production on sports biopic “Unstoppable: The Anthony Robles Story,” would love for “I’m a Virgo” to get a second season, saying “there’s always more to flesh out, and there’s always questions to answer,” he is content with the one season they all got away with streaming on a platform owned and operated by Amazon. 

“Shoutout to it truly being a milestone and a foot forward for Black cinema, and for cinema for people of color who don’t often get to play wacky characters like this,” said Jerome. “I just was happy to be a part of something that felt so different and nuanced. And I don’t think this is going to come around again for a long time.”