Rachel Sennott enters the online meeting and immediately launches into an excuse. “Oh my God – I’m sorry!” she states, sounding genuinely regretful. She is only a couple of minutes behind, she needs to explain. “I have such a problem, because I’m a yapper on the phone. “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Fortunately, during an interview, this is precisely what one hopes to experience. Moreover, it’s fairly unsurprising. Anyone familiar with the fearlessly queer and outspoken film titled Bottoms—that she co-wrote with Emma Seligman and starred in together with close companion the talented actress—will already know that Sennott holds much to share, whether on gender, sex, or the merits of creating a high-school fight club. And, once you finish the latest multi-episode show I Love LA, it becomes obvious that she holds additional insights regarding the darker side of young adulthood (Now in her thirties, Sennott represents a bridge of the gang, a tale-end millennial with a knack for straddling different age groups).
Influences and Storytelling Approach
The comparisons to the iconic series Girls can’t be avoided and the actress admits to being an admirer, naming it alongside the classic series, Insecure and Donald Glover’s series as influences for I Love LA, which details the struggles of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend and new representative Sennott’s character. However, the biggest spot on creative vision was reserved for Entourage, that program focusing on an up-and-coming A-list actor navigating in a gritty entertainment industry (notable statement: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). Sennott started watching it during the pandemic, became “captivated”, and decided to create a new version on it “targeting women and LGBTQ+ viewers”.
“My aim was to focus on digital fame over traditional entertainment, as my own beginnings were on the web,” she notes. The concept for I Love LA came—in part—from her own, initially rocky, move to LA and from the cosmic event, a popular phenomenon for enthusiasts. It was a time that included her grasp some big truths, professionally and in private life. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she admits. “Settling in LA during my mid-twenties brought calm, but soon everything unraveled.” “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Early Beginnings
Raised in Connecticut, the star started writing and performing stand-up while pursuing performance at NYU’s Tisch. “Despite trying every conventional route, I couldn’t find my footing,” she says. “Auditions for university comedy troupes led to universal rejection. “None of the university plays cast me either.” And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
She took matters into her own hands, taking the stage at amateur nights with Edebiri and posting hysterical (and very) weird skits digitally. One, titled Baby Cult, centered on characters intensely drawn to motherhood; a different one imagined being employed at a trendy retail outlet as like being stuck in a scary movie. By chance, she met Emma through the university’s film scene and eventually starring in her initial project, Shiva Baby, a stressful comedy set at a Jewish wake with shades of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The big theme of her career, she says, has been contemporaries supporting her, as opposed to traditional networks. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “They were not involved”, she emphasizes, adding with a laugh: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Rising Success
Individuals who were skeptical about Sennott then will likely be regretting it currently. In what she describes as a “incredibly circular” story, she appears to achieved her dream vehicle. Previously she shared content called about Los Angeles online, in which she parodied movie previews (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Years later, she’s a lead creator (with Emma Barrie) of a series about city dwellers balancing benefits of internet fame (such as socializing at Elijah Wood’s house) with its pitfalls (your friend being suspected of being a substance-abusing criminal, and perhaps becoming a risky outcast). Some could easy to produce a program about online fame that was overly idealized—or, more problematic, one that punched down at its subjects. I Love LA does neither, making for a depiction of advantaged millennial living that’s frank about the grot and the appeal.
Nuanced Portrayal
“Many programs portray youth and online life with disdain and mockery,” 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
