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Rachel Sennott enters the video call and immediately launches into an excuse. “Apologies for the delay!” she says, seeming truly regretful. Despite being only slightly delayed, she needs to explain. “I tend to talk too much during calls. “Previous discussions went over, and I realized I talk too much!” Thankfully, during an interview, this is just what you want to hear. Moreover, it’s fairly predictable. Viewers who have seen her boldly queer and outspoken movie titled Bottoms—which she co-wrote with Emma Seligman and starred in together with close companion The Bear’s standout—can be aware that she has a lot to share, whether on gender, intimacy, or the merits of starting a teen fight club. And, once you finish her latest multi-episode show I Love LA, viewers realize that she has additional perspectives regarding the struggles of modern youth (Now in her thirties, Sennott is a relatable figure of the gang, straddling eras adept for bridging different age groups).

Inspirations and Creative Vision

Likenesses to the iconic series Girls naturally arise and the actress is an admirer, naming it together with Sex and the City, Issa Rae’s show and Donald Glover’s series as influences for the project, which details the struggles of an influencer Tallulah and close companion and fledgling talent manager Sennott’s character. Notably, the largest presence on creative vision belonged to Entourage, that show about an emerging Hollywood star making his way in an often-seedy entertainment industry (notable statement: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). Sennott discovered it throughout the pandemic, became “captivated”, and chose to put her own twist on it “with female and queer audiences in mind”.

“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she says. The idea for the series came—partly—from personal, at first difficult, move to LA and from the astrological phase, a frequently discussed phenomenon for followers. This represented a time that included her grasp some big truths, professionally and personally. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” 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 the East Coast, Sennott started creating and acting stand-up while studying theatre at NYU’s Tisch. “Despite trying every conventional route, I couldn’t find my footing,” she states. “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 decided to act independently, taking the stage at amateur nights with Edebiri and sharing hilarious (and very) bizarre comedy videos on the internet. One, Baby Cult, depicted several females fetishistically obsessed with having babies; a different one envisioned being employed at the preppy clothing store Hollister as similar to being stuck in a horror film. Interestingly, she encountered Emma through campus film circles and ended up appearing in her directorial debut, Shiva Baby, a tense comedy set at a funeral gathering with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. A recurring idea of her career, she says, has been peers supporting her, rather than the industry at large. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “Not the gatekeepers”, she emphasizes, stating amusedly: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”

Manifesting Dreams

Anyone who were skeptical about her then will certainly be regretting it now. As part of she describes as a “astonishingly complete” development, she has created an ideal role. Previously she uploaded content called about Los Angeles on social media, in which she lampooned film promos (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Six years on, she’s a lead creator (with her partner) of a series about LA residents balancing benefits of online celebrity (such as socializing at Elijah Wood’s house) with downsides (your friend being labeled as being a intoxicated stealer, and potentially becoming a “brand unsafe” outcast). One might easy to make a show about digital influence that was overly aspirational—or, even less favorable, one that mocked at its subjects. This show avoids both, resulting in a representation of affluent twentysomething existence that’s frank about the chaos and the shine.

Nuanced Portrayal

“There have been a lot of shows that depict young people and their relationship to the internet in this very condescending, hateful way,” she comments. “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