Exclusive | Fantastic Beasts actor Carmen Ejogo: The society is quite terrified by people that are really full of promise

Big, bold curls, a distinct face, and a repertoire that screams versatility. Carmen Ejogo has donned many a hat in her long and illustrious acting career to this date, and she is an absolute delight to watch as the overtly protective mother to a modern-day giant, Cootie, in Boots Riley’s next outing with Prime Video, I’m A Virgo.
Edited excerpts from our exclusive conversation with the award-winning actress:

The person we see on screen, as lead Cootie’s mother Lafrancine, is obviously very loving but also a tad strict and fiercely protective. How different is that character from Carmen—the real-life mom in you?

Oh, Jeez (laughs!) I mean, I think I've tried to act like the fearless sort of like self-defining mom in the world and I tried not to be the helicopter mom that's like all that, you know, raise my kids in a way that made them just super, super, super anxious. But, I have to say raising kids in America, it's almost inevitable that there's going to be daily anxiety in figuring out how to navigate a lot of the daily challenges that just come at you. 

So, I think like Lafrancine, I think I've definitely had moments of, you know, just fear for my kids, like, how is the world going to handle? (Although they are) brilliant, bright and big personalities and in their own way. For Cootie, because often society doesn't know what to do with people like that (referring to his giant stature), the society is quite sort of terrified by people that are really full of promise. And so, yeah, I suppose in that way, we've been pretty similar, and I've definitely sort of relied on my own personal parental experience to figure out how to play this character, right? 

During the initial phase of discussion, what conversations were taking place behind the scenes with Boots Riley, as far as your place in I’m A Virgo is concerned?

Yeah. So, I actually, I workshopped for Sorry To Bother You with Boots out in Utah and then couldn't do the movie in the end. But, so I knew exactly what kind of vibe he was going to be about. I knew what he was going to be aiming for. And then obviously, I've seen the movie that he ended up making as his debut. So, I was very aware. So, when he emailed me and asked me if I wanted to do this, I was on board immediately because I knew it. 

Even if it was a like, even if it was an abysmal failure, it would be really creative and it would be a real, like, exciting journey to get to something. And I, I sometimes that's as valuable as having a project that just feels like super polished and like finessed at the end, just the idea of like, really, truly reaching for something that is authentically creative from the start that excites me when any director like gets into a conversation with me, so that I think he'd already proven his worth in that sense when I worked with him out in Utah at the Sundance Director's lab. 

And then I, when I read this, when I read this script, when I finally got to read it, it was kind of similar sort of like feeling that I had when I read, “sorry to bother you”, which was just like, this is amazing. This is like some of the best writing and, you know, for all of the incredible visuals that you're going to get to enjoy in this show out of which there are so many, there's like, we, we, we're working with puppets, we're working with, with false perspective, all of these like cool old school tricks of film making. You're also working with an amazing script and amazing ideas that are being vocalized and put into the mouths of these characters. 

And I think you're going to get a, a double whammy of both a lot of fun and weirdness and wildness. But you're also going to get a lot of real content and stuff to think on which that's my sweet spot when it comes to filmmaking. 

I also wanted to know what you think about the young actors who are with you along this journey. I thought they were really distinct and extremely powerful in their own right. Your two bits on them?

Yeah. Well, I think they're so talented. I felt very lucky to be working with such a, like new fresh batch of actors because for, for, for a lot of reasons, like partly because they just have new ideas that and just new, like a, just a different sort of spin or a different feel that they bring to the set every day. And also, just happy for them because they're just getting to do the sort of stuff that like so many of us actors in Hollywood have worked so hard to help make happen. 

Like finally you get young, brilliant actors of color that can do a crazy, weird surreal show like this, that can be about all kinds of ideas and all kinds of things and it's not just like, like this very sort of narrow perception of what we are and the kind of stories we are and are not allowed to tell. So, it was a, it was just extremely, extremely fun for me in, in many, many, many ways to be part of this. And I really like the show that we actually ended up making gets like, and you got to stay with it because it's like, it's just like the first episode is like, ok, what is this? And then it's like you get to the next and then the next and it's, and then it starts, and then you start to really connect the dots and then it just becomes this really inventive original, seven-episode season.