The star enters the online meeting and immediately starts an apology. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she exclaims, seeming really regretful. She is only slightly delayed, she feels compelled to explain. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Luckily, during an interview, this is just what you want to hear. Besides, it’s quite unsurprising. Anyone who have seen her boldly openly gay and brash film titled Bottoms—which she penned with Emma Seligman and starred in alongside collaborator Ayo Edebiri—will already know that Sennott holds plenty to discuss, ranging from about identity, sex, or the merits of creating a youth brawl society. Plus, after watching the recent eight-part show I Love LA, it is clear that the star holds even more insights about the challenges of young adulthood (Now in her thirties, she serves as a bridge of the gang, straddling eras with a knack for bridging both generations).
Guiding Lights and Artistic Direction
Likenesses to Lena Dunham’s Girls can’t be avoided and Sennott admits to being a fan, naming it in addition to the classic series, Insecure and Atlanta as influences for the project, which tracks the journey of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend who is also fledgling representative portrayed by Sennott. Notably, the biggest spot on the moodboard was reserved for the HBO series, that show depicting an up-and-coming Hollywood star making his way in a corrupt LA scene (memorable line: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). She started watching it amid the pandemic, became “obsessed”, and chose to put her own twist 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 notes. The concept for the series came—to some extent—from her own, at first rocky, move to Los Angeles and from her saturn return, a popular occurrence for followers. This represented an era that included her learn major truths, in her career and personally. “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 …”
Humble Origins
Growing up in Connecticut, Sennott started developing and showcasing stand-up while studying performance 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 states. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. “None of the university plays cast me either.” “I wondered why I was even there at all.”
Sennott seized control, performing at amateur nights with Ayo and sharing hilarious (and decidedly) weird online content digitally. One, Baby Cult, depicted several females fetishistically obsessed with pregnancy; a different one portrayed working at the brand Hollister as like being caught in a horror film. In a neat twist of fate, she met Seligman through NYU’s movie community and ended up starring in her first film, Shiva Baby, an anxious comedy set at a funeral gathering with shades of Uncut Gems. The big theme of her journey, she explains, has been people her own age offering opportunities, rather than the industry at large. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “They were not involved”, she emphasizes, continuing humorously: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Rising Success
Those who were skeptical regarding Sennott then will surely be feeling foolish today. In what she calls a “wild, full-circle” development, she has achieved the perfect project. In 2019 she shared content called about Los Angeles on the internet, in which she mocked movie previews (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Now, she’s the co-showrunner (with Emma Barrie) of a series about city dwellers managing the perks of internet fame (such as celebrating at a famous actor’s house) with its pitfalls (your friend being labeled as being a drug-addled stealer, and perhaps becoming a unreliable outcast). Some could tempting to make a show about internet celebrity that was overly idealized—or, even less favorable, one that punched down at the characters. I Love LA steers clear of each, creating a portrait of affluent millennial existence that’s honest about the chaos and the appeal.
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 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
