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Rachel Sennott enters the video call and immediately launches into an apology. “Apologies for the delay!” she states, sounding truly regretful. Despite being only a couple of minutes delayed, she feels compelled to justify. “I have such a problem, because I’m a yapper on the phone. I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Thankfully, during an interview, that’s exactly what you want to encounter. Moreover, it’s pretty expected. Anyone who have seen her fearlessly openly gay and brash movie titled Bottoms—which she co-wrote with the director and featured in together with collaborator The Bear’s standout—can already know that she has a lot to share, ranging from on identity, intimacy, or the pros of starting a youth combat group. Furthermore, once you finish the recent seasonal HBO series I Love LA, it is clear that she holds further thoughts regarding the darker side of young adulthood (As a millennial, she serves as an honorary member to younger audiences, on the cusp adept for straddling both generations).

Influences and Creative Vision

The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking show naturally arise and the actress admits to being an admirer, referencing the show together with the HBO hit, the acclaimed comedy and Donald Glover’s series as influences for her series, which tracks the journey of an influencer Tallulah and her friend who is also new agent Maia. However, the largest presence on creative vision was reserved for the popular sitcom, that show focusing on a rising A-list actor making his way in a gritty entertainment industry (choice quote: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). Sennott started watching it amid COVID-19, became “hooked”, and resolved to put her own twist 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 notes. The idea for I Love LA originated—in part—from her own, originally difficult, transition to Tinseltown and from her cosmic event, a frequently discussed event for astrology heads. That period marked a time that included her understand major life lessons, in her career and personally. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she says. “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 the East Coast, Sennott commenced writing and performing comedy while studying performance at NYU’s Tisch. “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. 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, taking the stage at open mics with Edebiri and sharing hilarious (and decidedly) unconventional online content digitally. A particular video, Baby Cult, centered on characters fetishistically fixated on motherhood; another imagined being employed at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being trapped in a horror film. By chance, she connected with Emma through NYU’s movie community and ultimately appearing in her first film, Shiva Baby, a tense film set at a Jewish wake with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her path, she says, has been contemporaries offering opportunities, rather than traditional networks. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “Not the gatekeepers”, she repeats, adding humorously: “They don’t want us to win.”

Rising Success

Anyone who had doubts regarding her previously will certainly be regretting it today. As part of she describes as a “wild, full-circle” story, she seems to have achieved the perfect project. A few years back she uploaded content called on LA life on the internet, in which she lampooned film promos (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Now, she’s the co-showrunner (with her partner) of a show about LA residents managing advantages of digital stardom (such as socializing at a celebrity’s house) with drawbacks (your client being accused of being a drug-addled thief, and possibly becoming a risky pariah). It would be simple to produce a program about internet celebrity that was overly idealized—or, worse, one that mocked at the characters. I Love LA avoids both, creating a representation of privileged young adult living that’s frank about the grot and the appeal.

Empathetic Approach

“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