🔗 Share this article

Rachel Sennott joins the digital interview and right away starts an explanation. “Apologies for the delay!” she says, seeming really regretful. She is only a couple of minutes late, she feels compelled to justify. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Luckily, during an interview, that’s precisely what one hopes to encounter. Additionally, it’s pretty unsurprising. Anyone who know her fearlessly queer and brash film Bottoms—which she penned with her creative partner and appeared in together with collaborator Ayo Edebiri—can already know that she has plenty to discuss, ranging from on roles, intimacy, or the appeal of creating a teen combat group. Plus, once you finish her new eight-part show titled I Love LA, it becomes obvious that she carries further insights regarding the challenges of young adulthood (At 30, Sennott represents a bridge for this generation, straddling eras with a knack for straddling millennials and Gen Z).

Inspirations and Storytelling Approach

Likenesses to the iconic series Girls can’t be avoided and the actress readily acknowledges an admirer, referencing the show alongside the classic series, the acclaimed comedy and Donald Glover’s series as guides for the project, which tracks the travails of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend who is also aspiring agent Maia. However, the largest spot on concept went to the HBO series, the program depicting an up-and-coming Hollywood star navigating in a gritty Hollywood (notable statement: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). She began viewing it throughout lockdown, became “captivated”, and chose to create a new version on it “with female and queer audiences in mind”.

“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she notes. The concept for the series came—to some extent—from her own, originally rocky, move to Tinseltown and from the saturn return, a frequently discussed occurrence for enthusiasts. That period marked a phase that involved her learn significant truths, in her career and in private life. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she says. “Settling in LA during my mid-twenties brought calm, but soon everything unraveled.” “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”

Humble Origins

Raised in the East Coast, Sennott began writing and performing humor while studying performance at NYU’s Tisch. “I went through all the proper channels to try to perform, and they weren’t gelling,” 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?”

She took matters into her own hands, performing at open mics with Ayo and uploading uproarious (and very) bizarre online content on the internet. One, Baby Cult, centered on characters fetishistically fixated on pregnancy; another imagined being employed at the brand Hollister as akin to being caught in a horror film. In a neat twist of fate, she met Emma through campus film circles and ultimately featuring in her first film, titled Shiva Baby, an anxious film set at a funeral gathering with shades of the Safdie brothers’ movie. A recurring idea of her career, she says, has been people her own age supporting her, rather than the industry at large. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “Not the gatekeepers”, she confirms, adding amusedly: “Our victory isn’t their goal.”

Manifesting Dreams

Those who were skeptical about her previously will surely be feeling foolish now. In what she calls a “astonishingly complete” story, she has achieved an ideal role. A few years back she shared a clip titled about Los Angeles online, in which she lampooned Hollywood trailers (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Years later, she’s the co-showrunner (with her partner) of a series about Angelenos managing advantages of online celebrity (such as partying at a famous actor’s house) with drawbacks (your friend being accused of being a intoxicated thief, and perhaps becoming a “brand unsafe” persona non grata). One might tempting to produce a show about digital influence that was extremely glamorous—or, worse, one that belittled at the characters. The series steers clear of each, creating a depiction of advantaged twentysomething life that’s candid about the grot and the appeal.

Empathetic Approach

“Numerous series present younger generations and digital culture in a derogatory manner,” 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