Rachel Sennott enters the video call and right away starts an excuse. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, appearing really regretful. Despite being only a couple of minutes late, she needs to justify. “I tend to talk too much during calls. “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Thankfully, in this context, this is just what you want to hear. Additionally, it’s fairly unsurprising. Anyone who have seen her boldly queer and unapologetically crass film titled Bottoms—which Sennott penned with the director and appeared in alongside close companion Ayo Edebiri—would already know that Sennott holds plenty to say, be it about identity, intimacy, or the pros of starting a high-school fight club. Furthermore, once you finish the new seasonal program I Love LA, it is clear that she carries further thoughts regarding the struggles of modern youth (As a millennial, she is a bridge of the gang, a tale-end millennial adept for connecting both generations).
Guiding Lights and Storytelling Approach
Parallels to the iconic series Girls can’t be avoided and the actress is enthusiastic, citing it together with the classic series, Insecure and Donald Glover’s series as guides for her series, which tracks the travails of online personality Tallulah and ally and new representative Sennott’s character. Perhaps, the largest influence on creative vision went to Entourage, the program depicting an up-and-coming A-list actor making his way in a corrupt entertainment industry (notable statement: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). Sennott began viewing it during COVID-19, became “hooked”, and resolved to create a new version on it “for the girls and the gays”.
“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she explains. The inspiration for I Love LA came—partly—from her own, at first difficult, transition to Los Angeles and from her saturn return, a frequently discussed phenomenon for astrology heads. This represented a time that involved her grasp some big truths, in her career and in private life. “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. “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Early Beginnings
Growing up in the East Coast, Sennott started writing and performing humor while pursuing theatre at NYU’s Tisch. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she explains. “Auditions for university comedy troupes led to universal rejection. “None of the university plays cast me either.” “It left me questioning my purpose and place.”
She decided to act independently, performing at live shows with Ayo and uploading hilarious (and very) unconventional online content on the internet. A particular video, Baby Cult, followed characters obsessively obsessed with having babies; another portrayed being employed at the brand Hollister as similar to being caught in a scary movie. In a neat twist of fate, she encountered Seligman through the university’s film scene and eventually starring in her first film, titled Shiva Baby, a tense film set at a religious event with echoes of the intense thriller. A recurring idea of her journey, she notes, has been people her own age offering opportunities, instead of the industry at large. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “They were not involved”, she emphasizes, continuing with a laugh: “Our victory isn’t their goal.”
Manifesting Dreams
Individuals who were skeptical about her earlier will surely be regretting it currently. Through she labels a “astonishingly complete” development, she seems to have achieved an ideal role. In 2019 she uploaded a video called “it’s LA” online, in which she parodied Hollywood trailers (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Now, she’s the co-showrunner (with Emma Barrie) of a comedy about LA residents managing benefits of internet fame (such as partying at a famous actor’s house) with drawbacks (your friend being labeled as being a intoxicated stealer, and potentially becoming a unreliable persona non grata). It would be simple to produce a show about internet celebrity that was overly idealized—or, more problematic, one that belittled at its subjects. I Love LA does neither, making for a representation of affluent millennial living that’s honest about the grot and the shine.
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
