In the brand-new crime comedy I Love Boosters, director Boots Riley presents a vision of rebellion against the capitalist scheme that’s not only highly principled in its execution, but dripping with fantastically fashionable, faux-fur-trimmed, Technicolor glamour, too.
As Jianhu—a former Chinese factory worker who flees to the Bay Area to join a crew of professional shoplifters—Poppy Liu (whom you may also recognize from Hacks) is known for speaking out about the political issues that matter most to her, and in I Love Boosters, she joins a stacked cast to bring to life a script that confronts those issues head-on.
“None of us did this movie to make money,” Liu says, “but I think it’s my favorite job I’ve ever done.” Here, she tells Vogue all about it.
Vogue: How did you prepare to portray Jianhu in I Love Boosters?
Poppy Liu: I respect Boots [Riley] so much as an artist and a creative for how he uses his voice and artistry for social commentary, and I feel a lot of alignment with him politically, so we really got into it. The movie covers so much; not just the critique of capitalism, but also the class solidarity piece and the relational global solidarity piece between the US and China, which I think is really huge. I think the thesis that he’s making with the film is kind of a “Workers of the world unite” thing, where we’re kind of held apart by the same forces and systems of power, but for the character herself, she isn’t really thinking about any of this. She’s just a girl in China who works in a factory and likes to mess around and fuck off and be a young kid, and you kind of see her get radicalized in real time because she’s seeing what’s happening to her family and loved ones and feels the need to do something about it.
Tell me about Jianhu’s political evolution throughout the film.
Even by the end of the film, I don’t think Jianhu is someone who necessarily self-identifies as an activist or an organizer or a revolutionary, but all of her actions are that, because I think at the heart of all of those identities is someone who dares to imagine the world to be better than it is, and takes action in that direction, however big or small. The minute she appears, she has this laser focus on wanting to get labor rights for her people at the factory in China by any means necessary, and she’s tremendously brave. Still, I don’t think she’s thinking about herself in that way; she’s just like, “We want longer breaks, better working hours, better pay, and stop making us use chemicals that give us diseases and cancer.” They’re all tangible things, not classroom-revolutionary stuff where you’re sort of theorizing about it. That’s important too, but I think Jianhu is very much someone who’s just out here and doing the thing. She’s very action-oriented, and I really love her a lot as a character.
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