Rachel Sennott enters the video call and right away launches into an explanation. “Apologies for the delay!” she exclaims, sounding genuinely remorseful. She is only a couple of minutes behind, she wants to explain. “My phone conversations always run long.” I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Thankfully, in this context, this is just what you want to encounter. Besides, it’s pretty predictable. Viewers who have seen the fearlessly openly gay and brash project titled Bottoms—which she co-wrote with her creative partner and starred in together with collaborator The Bear’s standout—will be aware that she has plenty to say, be it on gender, relationships, or the merits of forming a teen brawl society. Plus, after watching the latest seasonal HBO series I Love LA, viewers realize that the star has further insights about the darker side of modern youth (As a millennial, Sennott is a bridge to younger audiences, a tale-end millennial skilled for straddling both generations).
Likenesses to Lena Dunham’s Girls are inevitable and Sennott is an admirer, referencing it alongside Sex and the City, Insecure and the innovative program as inspirations for the project, which details the journey of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend and aspiring talent manager Maia. Perhaps, the biggest influence on concept was reserved for Entourage, that program depicting an emerging celebrity making his way in an often-seedy Hollywood (notable statement: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She discovered it amid the pandemic, became “obsessed”, and decided to add a fresh perspective on it “for the girls and the gays”.
“My aim was to focus on digital fame over traditional entertainment, as my own beginnings were on the web,” she notes. The idea for I Love LA came—to some extent—from her own, originally rocky, move to Los Angeles and from the saturn return, a much-talked-about event for followers. This represented an era that saw her learn major truths, in her career and in private life. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she recalls. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Brought up in New England, the star started writing and performing stand-up while pursuing theatre at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “I went through all the proper channels to try to perform, and they weren’t gelling,” she explains. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. “Theatre productions at school also didn’t accept me. “I wondered why I was even there at all.”
She decided to act independently, performing at live shows with Ayo and uploading uproarious (and distinctly) weird comedy videos online. One, Baby Cult, depicted characters obsessively obsessed with motherhood; another imagined working at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being stuck in a horror film. In a neat twist of fate, she connected with Emma through the university’s film scene and eventually featuring in her directorial debut, titled Shiva Baby, a stressful film set at a Jewish wake with echoes of the intense thriller. The central motif of her career, she says, has been people her own age giving her a shot, instead of the industry at large. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “Not the gatekeepers”, she confirms, stating humorously: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Individuals who were skeptical regarding Sennott earlier will likely be feeling foolish currently. Through she labels a “wild, full-circle” story, she appears to created her dream vehicle. In 2019 she uploaded a video called about Los Angeles online, in which she lampooned film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Years later, she’s a lead creator (with her partner) of a show about LA residents managing benefits of internet fame (such as celebrating at a famous actor’s house) with drawbacks (your associate being suspected of being a intoxicated stealer, and potentially becoming a unreliable pariah). It would be easy to produce a show about internet celebrity that was extremely idealized—or, worse, one that punched down at its subjects. This show steers clear of each, creating a portrait of advantaged young adult existence that’s frank about the grot and the glamour.
“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
Marcus Sterling is a financial analyst specializing in precious metals, with over 15 years of experience in global markets and investment strategies.