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Rachel Sennott enters the digital interview and at once launches into an explanation. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, sounding really remorseful. Despite being only slightly late, she needs to clarify. “My phone conversations always run long.” I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Thankfully, for a writer, this is exactly what one hopes to experience. Besides, it’s pretty unsurprising. Anyone familiar with her fearlessly queer and unapologetically crass movie Bottoms—which she collaborated on with Emma Seligman and appeared in alongside close companion The Bear’s standout—can already know that Sennott holds much to say, ranging from about identity, intimacy, or the merits of creating a teen fight club. And, once you finish her recent multi-episode show titled I Love LA, it becomes obvious that the star carries additional perspectives on the darker side of modern youth (At 30, she is a bridge for this generation, straddling eras adept for connecting different age groups).

Inspirations and Artistic Direction

Parallels to Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking show are inevitable and Sennott readily acknowledges an admirer, citing the show together with the HBO hit, Issa Rae’s show and Donald Glover’s series as guides for the project, which details the struggles of a social media star Tallulah and close companion and new representative Sennott’s character. Perhaps, the biggest presence on concept was reserved for the popular sitcom, the show about a rising A-list actor navigating in a gritty LA scene (notable statement: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). She discovered it amid the pandemic, became “captivated”, and resolved to put her own twist on it “targeting women and LGBTQ+ viewers”.

“I sought to highlight online platforms as the new industry, since my professional journey launched there,” she explains. The inspiration for this project came—in part—from firsthand, originally fractious, relocation to LA and from the saturn return, a much-talked-about phenomenon for followers. It was a phase that saw her understand significant life lessons, professionally and in private life. “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. It was almost like these biblical tests …”

Starting Out

Brought up in Connecticut, Sennott commenced developing and showcasing comedy while enrolled in performance at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “Despite trying every conventional route, I couldn’t find my footing,” she says. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. “None of the university plays cast me either.” And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”

She decided to act independently, performing at amateur nights with Edebiri and posting uproarious (and decidedly) weird skits online. One, Baby Cult, depicted characters intensely obsessed with having babies; a different one envisioned working at a trendy retail outlet as similar to being trapped in a thriller. By chance, she connected with Emma through the university’s film scene and ended up appearing in her first film, Shiva Baby, an anxious film set at a funeral gathering with shades of the intense thriller. The big theme of her career, she notes, has been people her own age supporting her, rather than the industry at large. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “Not the gatekeepers”, she emphasizes, continuing with a laugh: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”

Career Breakthrough

Anyone who had doubts regarding Sennott previously will likely be kicking themselves currently. In what she calls a “astonishingly complete” story, she seems to have created the perfect project. A few years back she shared a clip named on LA life online, in which she parodied movie previews (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Six years on, she’s the co-showrunner (with Emma Barrie) of a show about city dwellers managing benefits of online celebrity (such as socializing at Elijah Wood’s house) with its pitfalls (your friend being accused of being a intoxicated stealer, and possibly becoming a unreliable outcast). One might tempting to produce a series about digital influence that was overly aspirational—or, even less favorable, one that belittled at the characters. This show does neither, making for a portrait of affluent young adult life that’s candid about the chaos and the appeal.

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 says. “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