Rachel Sennott enters the video call and right away starts an excuse. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she says, appearing really regretful. She is only slightly behind, she needs to justify. “My phone conversations always run long.” I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Luckily, for a writer, that’s exactly what is ideal to experience. Moreover, it’s fairly predictable. Viewers who know her unapologetically LGBTQ+ and outspoken movie Bottoms—that she collaborated on with her creative partner and appeared in together with collaborator the talented actress—will be aware that Sennott holds plenty to share, be it about gender, intimacy, or the appeal of forming a high-school fight club. Furthermore, after watching the recent seasonal show titled I Love LA, viewers realize that the star holds additional perspectives regarding the struggles of Gen Z life (Now in her thirties, Sennott represents a bridge to younger audiences, on the cusp with a knack for straddling millennials and Gen Z).
Inspirations and Artistic Direction
The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls naturally arise and Sennott admits to being enthusiastic, naming it in addition to the classic series, Insecure and Donald Glover’s series as inspirations for her series, which follows the struggles of a social media star Tallulah and ally who is also new agent Maia. However, the most significant influence on concept belonged to Entourage, that show about an emerging celebrity succeeding in a gritty entertainment industry (memorable line: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She discovered it amid the pandemic, became “hooked”, and decided to create a new version 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 the series emerged—partly—from her own, at first rocky, relocation to Los Angeles and from her saturn return, a much-talked-about occurrence for astrology heads. This represented a phase that saw her understand major life lessons, in her career and in private life. “My twenties began with constant public emotional outbursts and disorganization,” she says. “Settling in LA during my mid-twenties brought calm, but soon everything unraveled.” “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Starting Out
Raised in New England, Sennott started writing and performing humor while enrolled in performance at NYU’s Tisch. “I went through all the proper channels to try to perform, and they weren’t gelling,” 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, appearing at amateur nights with Ayo and sharing uproarious (and very) bizarre online content on the internet. One, Baby Cult, depicted characters intensely drawn to pregnancy; a different one envisioned being employed at the preppy clothing store Hollister as like being trapped in a scary movie. By chance, she encountered Seligman through campus film circles and ended up appearing in her initial project, titled Shiva Baby, an anxious comedy set at a funeral gathering with shades of the intense thriller. The central motif of her journey, she says, has been people her own age supporting her, rather than established gatekeepers. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “They were not involved”, she repeats, continuing humorously: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Career Breakthrough
Anyone who questioned about Sennott then will surely be regretting it now. As part of she describes as a “wild, full-circle” development, she seems to have manifested the perfect project. A few years back she shared content titled about Los Angeles on the internet, in which she lampooned film promos (“Everyone’s hooked on something”). Years later, she’s a lead creator (with the co-writer) of a comedy about LA residents juggling advantages of digital stardom (such as celebrating at Elijah Wood’s house) with drawbacks (your associate being suspected of being a intoxicated criminal, and potentially becoming a risky persona non grata). One might easy to make a program about internet celebrity that was overly glamorous—or, even less favorable, one that punched down at the characters. I Love LA steers clear of each, creating a depiction of advantaged twentysomething living that’s candid about the grot and the glamour.
Empathetic Approach
“Numerous series present younger generations and digital culture in a derogatory manner,” she says. “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
