Rachel Sennott enters the online meeting and at once launches into an apology. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she says, seeming genuinely remorseful. Although she's only slightly late, she wants to clarify. “I tend to talk too much during calls. I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Thankfully, for a writer, that’s exactly what you want to encounter. Besides, it’s pretty unsurprising. Viewers who know the unapologetically queer and brash film Bottoms—that she co-wrote with her creative partner and appeared in alongside collaborator the talented actress—can already know that she has much to say, whether on roles, sex, or the appeal of creating a high-school fight club. And, once you finish her new multi-episode program I Love LA, viewers realize that the star carries even more perspectives on the challenges of Gen Z life (Now in her thirties, Sennott is an honorary member of the gang, a tale-end millennial adept for bridging millennials and Gen Z).
Influences and Artistic Direction
The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls are inevitable and Sennott readily acknowledges enthusiastic, naming it together with Sex and the City, Issa Rae’s show and the innovative program as guides for her series, which details the travails of online personality Tallulah and close companion and fledgling representative Sennott’s character. Perhaps, the most significant spot on the moodboard went to the popular sitcom, the show focusing on an emerging celebrity succeeding in an often-seedy entertainment industry (choice quote: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). Sennott discovered it amid lockdown, became “hooked”, and resolved to put her own twist 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 idea for this project came—partly—from her own, originally fractious, transition to LA and from her saturn return, a much-talked-about event for astrology heads. This represented an era that involved her learn 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. “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”
Early Beginnings
Growing up in New England, the star began creating and acting comedy while enrolled in theatre at a prestigious arts school. “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. “I wondered why I was even there at all.”
She took matters into her own hands, appearing at amateur nights with Ayo and sharing uproarious (and decidedly) weird skits online. One, Baby Cult, depicted several females intensely fixated on motherhood; another envisioned working at a trendy retail outlet as similar to being trapped in a horror film. Interestingly, she connected with Emma through the university’s film scene and ended up appearing in her first film, Shiva Baby, a stressful dramedy set at a religious event with echoes of the intense thriller. The central motif of her path, she says, has been contemporaries giving her a shot, as opposed to established gatekeepers. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “They were not involved”, she emphasizes, continuing with a laugh: “They don’t want us to win.”
Career Breakthrough
Anyone who were skeptical regarding her previously will certainly be kicking themselves now. In what she calls a “wild, full-circle” turn of events, she seems to have manifested the perfect project. Previously she shared a video named about Los Angeles on the internet, in which she parodied film promos (“Everyone’s hooked on something”). Six years on, she’s the co-showrunner (with Emma Barrie) of a show about city dwellers managing benefits of internet fame (such as socializing at Elijah Wood’s house) with drawbacks (your friend being suspected of being a drug-addled criminal, and possibly becoming a unreliable persona non grata). It would be easy to make a program about online fame that was horribly idealized—or, more problematic, one that punched down at the characters. This show steers clear of each, resulting in a depiction of privileged young adult living that’s honest about the grot and the glamour.
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 comments. “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
