Rachel Sennott joins the digital interview and at once launches into an excuse. “Oh my God – I’m sorry!” she says, appearing genuinely remorseful. Although she's only slightly late, she wants to clarify. “I tend to talk too much during calls. “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Thankfully, in this context, this is exactly what one hopes to hear. Moreover, it’s pretty predictable. Viewers who know her fearlessly queer and unapologetically crass film titled Bottoms—which she penned with Emma Seligman and featured in with her friend the talented actress—would be aware that she holds much to share, ranging from about gender, sex, or the appeal of creating a high-school brawl society. Furthermore, once you finish the latest eight-part program I Love LA, it becomes obvious that she holds further insights regarding the challenges of modern youth (Now in her thirties, she serves as a relatable figure to younger audiences, straddling eras with a knack for bridging millennials and Gen Z).
Influences and Artistic Direction
Parallels to Lena Dunham’s Girls can’t be avoided and the actress readily acknowledges an admirer, citing it together with the classic series, Issa Rae’s show and the innovative program as influences for the project, which tracks the journey of an influencer Tallulah and ally and new talent manager Maia. Notably, the largest influence on concept belonged to the popular sitcom, that program about an up-and-coming Hollywood star making his way in an often-seedy entertainment industry (choice quote: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). She started watching it during lockdown, became “captivated”, and decided to create a new version on it “with female and queer audiences in mind”.
“My aim was to focus on digital fame over traditional entertainment, as my own beginnings were on the web,” she says. The concept for this project came—in part—from her own, at first difficult, transition to Los Angeles and from the saturn return, a much-talked-about event for enthusiasts. That period marked an era that involved her understand some big insights, in her career and individually. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she says. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. It was almost like these biblical tests …”
Humble Origins
Raised in the East Coast, Sennott commenced writing and performing humor while pursuing acting at NYU’s Tisch. “Despite trying every conventional route, I couldn’t find my footing,” she explains. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. I tried out for all the NYU plays and didn’t make it into any of them. And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
Sennott took matters into her own hands, performing at amateur nights with her friend and posting hysterical (and distinctly) weird comedy videos on the internet. One, Baby Cult, centered on characters obsessively obsessed with having babies; another imagined working at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being stuck in a horror film. By chance, she encountered Seligman through the university’s film scene and eventually appearing in her initial project, Shiva Baby, an anxious dramedy set at a Jewish wake with shades of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The big theme of her journey, she notes, has been contemporaries supporting her, as opposed to traditional networks. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “Not the gatekeepers”, she confirms, continuing amusedly: “They don’t want us to win.”
Career Breakthrough
Individuals who questioned about Sennott earlier will certainly be kicking themselves now. As part of she calls a “wild, full-circle” story, she seems to have manifested the perfect project. Previously she shared a clip named on LA life on social media, in which she parodied film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Now, she’s a lead creator (with the co-writer) of a comedy about city dwellers juggling the perks of internet fame (such as partying at a famous actor’s house) with drawbacks (your associate being accused of being a substance-abusing stealer, and potentially becoming a unreliable outcast). It would be easy to produce a program about online fame that was overly idealized—or, even less favorable, one that belittled at its subjects. I Love LA does neither, making for a depiction of privileged twentysomething living that’s frank about the grot and the appeal.
Nuanced Portrayal
“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
