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In the brand-new crime comedy I Love Boosters,<\/em> director Boots Riley presents a vision of rebellion against the capitalist scheme that\u2019s not only highly principled in its execution, but dripping with fantastically fashionable, faux-fur-trimmed, Technicolor glamour, too.<\/p>\n As Jianhu\u2014a former Chinese factory worker who flees to the Bay Area to join a crew of professional shoplifters\u2014Poppy Liu (whom you may also recognize from Hacks<\/em><\/a>) is known for speaking out<\/a> about the political issues that matter most to her, and in I Love Boosters<\/em>, she joins a stacked cast to bring to life a script that confronts those issues head-on.<\/p>\n \u201cNone of us did this movie to make money,\u201d Liu says, \u201cbut I think it\u2019s my favorite job I\u2019ve ever done.\u201d Here, she tells Vogue<\/em> all about it.<\/p>\n Vogue<\/em>: How did you prepare to portray Jianhu in I Love Boosters<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n Poppy Liu:<\/strong> 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\u2019s making with the film is kind of a \u201cWorkers of the world unite\u201d thing, where we\u2019re kind of held apart by the same forces and systems of power, but for the character herself, she isn\u2019t really thinking about any of this. She\u2019s 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\u2019s seeing what\u2019s happening to her family and loved ones and feels the need to do something about it.<\/p>\n Tell me about Jianhu\u2019s political evolution throughout the film.<\/strong><\/p>\n Even by the end of the film, I don\u2019t 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\u2019s tremendously brave. Still, I don\u2019t think she\u2019s thinking about herself in that way; she\u2019s just like, \u201cWe want longer breaks, better working hours, better pay, and stop making us use chemicals that give us diseases and cancer.\u201d They\u2019re all tangible things, not classroom-revolutionary stuff where you\u2019re sort of theorizing about it. That\u2019s important too, but I think Jianhu is very much someone who\u2019s just out here and doing the thing. She\u2019s very action-oriented, and I really love her a lot as a character.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n