Rachel Sennott appears on the online meeting and right away begins an excuse. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she says, seeming really remorseful. Although she's only a couple of minutes delayed, she wants 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, for a writer, that’s precisely what you want to hear. Besides, it’s pretty unsurprising. Viewers who have seen her unapologetically LGBTQ+ and unapologetically crass film Bottoms—that she penned with Emma Seligman and featured in alongside collaborator the talented actress—can be aware that Sennott holds a lot to discuss, be it about gender, relationships, or the appeal of starting a youth fight club. Plus, once you finish the latest multi-episode program titled I Love LA, viewers realize that she has even more thoughts on the darker side of modern youth (At 30, Sennott represents an honorary member to younger audiences, straddling eras adept for bridging different age groups).
Inspirations and Storytelling Approach
Parallels to the iconic series Girls are inevitable and Sennott readily acknowledges enthusiastic, citing the show together with Sex and the City, Insecure and Donald Glover’s series as guides for I Love LA, which follows the journey of a social media star Tallulah and ally who is also aspiring agent portrayed by Sennott. However, the largest presence on creative vision went to Entourage, the show focusing on a rising Hollywood star succeeding in a gritty Hollywood (notable statement: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). Sennott started watching it throughout the pandemic, became “captivated”, and chose to put her own twist on it “with female and queer audiences in mind”.
“My aim was to focus on digital fame over traditional entertainment, as my own beginnings were on the web,” she says. The inspiration for I Love LA originated—in part—from personal, at first rocky, relocation to LA and from her saturn return, a popular occurrence for followers. This represented an era that involved her grasp some big insights, professionally and personally. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she says. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”
Starting Out
Brought up in New England, the star began developing and showcasing comedy while studying 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. I tried out for all the NYU plays and didn’t make it into any of them. “It left me questioning my purpose and place.”
She took matters into her own hands, appearing at live shows with Ayo and sharing hilarious (and distinctly) weird skits online. One, Baby Cult, followed a group of women fetishistically obsessed with motherhood; another envisioned working at a trendy retail outlet as similar to being trapped in a scary movie. In a neat twist of fate, she connected with Seligman through the university’s film scene and ultimately starring in her first film, Shiva Baby, an anxious comedy set at a funeral gathering with echoes of the intense thriller. A recurring idea of her career, she says, has been peers supporting her, as opposed to traditional networks. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “They were not involved”, she confirms, adding amusedly: “They don’t want us to win.”
Career Breakthrough
Those who had doubts regarding Sennott then will surely be feeling foolish now. In what she calls a “astonishingly complete” turn of events, she seems to have achieved her dream vehicle. In 2019 she uploaded a video titled on LA life online, in which she parodied movie previews (“Everyone’s hooked on something”). Six years on, she’s the co-showrunner (with the co-writer) of a show about city dwellers managing the perks of digital stardom (such as celebrating at Elijah Wood’s house) with downsides (your client being labeled as being a substance-abusing thief, and potentially becoming a “brand unsafe” persona non grata). It would be simple to create a program about online fame that was horribly idealized—or, even less favorable, one that punched down at its subjects. This show steers clear of each, resulting in a portrait of privileged millennial existence that’s candid 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 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
