Trailer
Plot summary
Cassius Green, broke and sleeping in his uncle Sergio's garage in Oakland with his girlfriend Detroit, lands a job at the RegalView telemarketing firm after an interview in which the manager spots the lies on his application. On the phones he freezes and customers hang up. The veteran caller beside him, Langston, tells him to try a "white voice", the blithe manner of the people he is selling to, and the sales start coming. Cash's co-worker Squeeze is organizing the callers into a union and invites Cash and Detroit to join. RegalView's biggest client is WorryFree, which offers employees housing, food and lifetime contracts, and which the activist group Left Eye calls slave labor.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Minimal changes were made to the film's script to avoid appearing to critique Donald Trump specifically, including removing a line where a character says "WorryFree is making America great again", which was written before Trump used the phrase in his 2016 campaign.
- Boots Riley finished the screenplay in 2012 but had no means to produce it, so he recorded an album of the same title with his band The Coup instead. The screenplay was published in full in McSweeney's issue 48 in 2014.
- It was rumored that Steve Buscemi performed the "white voice" of Danny Glover's character Langston, but Boots Riley revealed it was actually the film's sound engineer, Ryan Coursey.
- Following the film's premiere at Sundance, producer Megan Ellison gave Boots Riley $200,000 for reshoots and an additional scene.
- Boots Riley based the screenplay on his own time working as a telemarketer and telefundraiser in California, and his need to put on a different voice to find success.
