Rachel Sennott appears on the online meeting and at once launches into an excuse. “Oh my God – I’m sorry!” she exclaims, appearing genuinely remorseful. Despite being only a couple of minutes late, she needs to clarify. “My phone conversations always run long.” I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Thankfully, for a writer, this is exactly what one hopes to encounter. Moreover, it’s fairly expected. Anyone who know the unapologetically LGBTQ+ and brash film Bottoms—that she co-wrote with her creative partner and starred in together with close companion The Bear’s standout—would understand that she holds much to share, whether on roles, sex, or the merits of starting a teen brawl society. And, after watching her new seasonal HBO series I Love LA, viewers realize that the star holds additional perspectives about the darker side of young adulthood (Now in her thirties, Sennott serves as a relatable figure of the gang, straddling eras adept for straddling different age groups).
Influences and Creative Vision
Likenesses to Lena Dunham’s Girls can’t be avoided and Sennott is an admirer, naming it in addition to the HBO hit, Insecure and Donald Glover’s series as inspirations for the project, which tracks the struggles of an influencer played by Odessa A’Zion and close companion and new representative Sennott’s character. However, the largest influence on creative vision belonged to the popular sitcom, that show depicting an up-and-coming Hollywood star making his way in a gritty entertainment industry (memorable line: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). She discovered it amid the pandemic, became “obsessed”, and chose to create a new version on it “targeting women and LGBTQ+ viewers”.
“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she explains. The inspiration for I Love LA came—to some extent—from personal, originally difficult, relocation to Los Angeles and from her cosmic event, a popular occurrence for astrology heads. This represented a phase that included her grasp some big truths, in her career and personally. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she admits. “In my mid-20s, I moved to LA and got settled. And then I felt like everything started to just fall apart. “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Starting Out
Brought up in Connecticut, the star started creating and acting humor while studying theatre at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she says. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. “None of the university plays cast me either.” “I wondered why I was even there at all.”
She decided to act independently, taking the stage at amateur nights with Ayo and posting hilarious (and decidedly) weird skits online. One, titled Baby Cult, depicted a group of women intensely obsessed with motherhood; a different one portrayed working at the preppy clothing store Hollister as like being caught in a scary movie. In a neat twist of fate, she connected with Emma through campus film circles and ended up starring in her first film, Shiva Baby, an anxious film set at a religious event with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her journey, she notes, has been peers offering opportunities, rather than traditional networks. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “Definitely not them”, she repeats, continuing amusedly: “They don’t want us to win.”
Rising Success
Those who were skeptical regarding her earlier will certainly be regretting it today. Through she describes as a “astonishingly complete” turn of events, she has achieved her dream vehicle. A few years back she posted a video called about Los Angeles on social media, in which she lampooned film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Now, she’s the co-showrunner (with the co-writer) of a show about LA residents juggling the perks of internet fame (such as partying at Elijah Wood’s house) with downsides (your associate being labeled as being a drug-addled criminal, and perhaps becoming a “brand unsafe” outcast). It would be simple to produce a program about online fame that was horribly idealized—or, worse, one that mocked at its subjects. I Love LA does neither, creating a representation of affluent young adult existence that’s frank about the chaos and the appeal.
Balanced Perspective
“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
