Rachel Sennott joins the online meeting and immediately starts an excuse. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, sounding really apologetic. She is only a couple of minutes delayed, she wants to explain. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Luckily, during an interview, this is exactly what you want to experience. Additionally, it’s quite unsurprising. Anyone who know her boldly LGBTQ+ and brash project titled Bottoms—that she penned with Emma Seligman and featured in with collaborator Ayo Edebiri—would be aware that she possesses a lot to say, be it on gender, relationships, or the merits of forming a teen fight club. Plus, by the end the latest eight-part HBO series I Love LA, it is clear that she carries additional insights on the darker side of Gen Z life (At 30, Sennott represents a bridge for this generation, a tale-end millennial with a knack for straddling millennials and Gen Z).
Guiding Lights and Artistic Direction
Parallels to Lena Dunham’s Girls are inevitable and the actress is an admirer, referencing it alongside Sex and the City, the acclaimed comedy and Donald Glover’s series as guides for I Love LA, which tracks the travails of an influencer played by Odessa A’Zion and ally and fledgling talent manager Maia. However, the largest influence on concept was reserved for the popular sitcom, that program about an emerging Hollywood star making his way in an often-seedy Hollywood (memorable line: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). Sennott began viewing it throughout COVID-19, became “captivated”, and decided to put her own twist on it “with female and queer audiences in mind”.
“I sought to highlight online platforms as the new industry, since my professional journey launched there,” she explains. The idea for I Love LA originated—partly—from firsthand, originally rocky, relocation to Los Angeles and from her cosmic event, a popular occurrence for enthusiasts. It was a phase that included her understand major insights, professionally and personally. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she recalls. “In my mid-20s, I moved to LA and got settled. And then I felt like everything started to just fall apart. It was almost like these biblical tests …”
Starting Out
Growing up in the East Coast, the star began writing and performing humor while enrolled in acting at NYU’s Tisch. “Despite trying every conventional route, I couldn’t find my footing,” she states. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. “Theatre productions at school also didn’t accept me. “It left me questioning my purpose and place.”
She decided to act independently, appearing at amateur nights with Ayo and sharing uproarious (and very) bizarre skits on the internet. A particular video, titled Baby Cult, depicted characters obsessively drawn to pregnancy; a different one portrayed being employed at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being caught in a scary movie. By chance, she encountered Emma through campus film circles and eventually featuring in her initial project, Shiva Baby, an anxious film set at a religious event with echoes of the intense thriller. A recurring idea of her career, she explains, has been peers offering opportunities, instead of established gatekeepers. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “They were not involved”, she repeats, continuing amusedly: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Rising Success
Anyone who were skeptical about Sennott earlier will certainly be regretting it currently. As part of she calls a “incredibly circular” turn of events, she seems to have achieved the perfect project. A few years back she posted content called on LA life on the internet, in which she parodied film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Six years on, she’s the co-showrunner (with her partner) of a show about city dwellers balancing benefits of online celebrity (such as socializing at Elijah Wood’s house) with its pitfalls (your associate being accused of being a drug-addled thief, and perhaps becoming a unreliable persona non grata). One might easy to produce a show about internet celebrity that was extremely glamorous—or, worse, one that belittled at the characters. This show avoids both, creating a depiction of affluent millennial existence that’s frank about the grot and the appeal.
Empathetic Approach
“There have been a lot of shows that depict young people and their relationship to the internet in this very condescending, hateful way,” she observes. “I think that young people have been through a lot – I’m mostly thinking of people younger than me, like my little sister, who went to college during Covid, so she had to come home, or my other sister who was doing school online.”|“The younger generation has faced significant
