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Rachel Sennott hops on to our Zoom call and immediately launches into an apology. “Oh my God – I’m sorry!” she says, sounding pained. She is only a couple of minutes late, but she is keen to explain. “I have such a problem, because I’m a yapper on the phone. I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Luckily, it’s exactly what a writer wants to hear at the start of an interview. Besides, it’s fairly unsurprising. Anyone who has watched the unapologetically queer, unapologetically crass film Bottoms – which Sennott co-wrote with Emma Seligman, and starred in alongside her friend, The Bear’s breakout star Ayo Edebiri – will already know that she has plenty to say, be it about gender, sex, or the merits of starting a high-school fight club. And by the end of her new eight-part HBO series I Love LA, it is clear that she has even more to say about the darker side of Gen Z life (at 30, she is an honorary member of the gang, a tale-end millennial with a knack for straddling both generations).
The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls are inevitable and Sennott is, of course, a fan, citing the show alongside Sex and the City, Insecure and Atlanta as influences for her series, which follows the travails of an influencer, Tallulah (Odessa A’Zion) and her friend and fledgling talent manager, Maia (Sennott). Perhaps the largest spot on the moodboard, though, went to Entourage, the HBO sitcom about a rising A-list actor making his way in an often-seedy Hollywood (choice quote: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). Sennott started watching it during the pandemic, became “obsessed”, and decided 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 says. The idea for I Love LA came – in part – from her own, initially fractious, move to Tinseltown and from her saturn return, a much-talked-about event for astrology heads. It was a period that saw her learn some big life lessons, 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 …”
Raised in Connecticut, Sennott began writing and performing comedy while studying acting 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 says. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. I tried out for all the NYU plays and didn’t make it into any of them. And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
Sennott took matters into her own hands, performing at open mics with Edebiri and posting hysterical (and decidedly weird) comedy videos online. One, Baby Cult, followed a group of women fetishistically obsessed with pregnancy; another imagined working at the preppy clothing store Hollister as akin to being trapped in a horror film. In a neat twist of fate, she met Seligman through the university’s film scene and ended up starring in her directorial debut, Shiva Baby, a tense comedy set at a Jewish wake with shades of Uncut Gems. The big theme of her career, she says, has been people her own age giving her a shot, rather than the industry at large. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “Not the gatekeepers”, she repeats, adding with a laugh: “They don’t want us to win.”
Anyone who had doubts about Sennott then will surely be kicking themselves now. In what she describes as a “wild, full-circle” turn of events, she seems to have manifested her dream vehicle. In 2019 she posted a video called “it’s LA” online, in which she lampooned Hollywood trailers (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Six years on, she’s the co-showrunner (with Emma Barrie) of a comedy about Angelenos balancing the perks of internet fame (such as partying at Elijah Wood’s house) with its pitfalls (your client being accused of being a drug-addled thief, and potentially becoming a “brand unsafe” pariah). It would be easy to make a show about online fame that was horribly aspirational – or, worse, one that punched down at its subjects. I Love LA does neither, making for a portrait of privileged twentysomething life 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 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.” These days, she says, “it doesn’t feel like the world is falling apart – the world is falling apart. And you get to a point where it’s depressing, it makes you nihilistic.” The internet can be bad and good, she says, “but I just feel like it’s never really approached with nuance – it’s like, look at these vapid idiots on their phones. I wanted to approach it in a way where I didn’t judge the characters. Obviously they’re comedy characters, but I tried to look at all of them with empathy.”
While it doesn’t offer full-on Marxist critique, I Love LA ponders the limits of the influencer economy, and the hidden costs of keeping up appearances. When we first meet Tallulah, she is living the high life – complete with an ill-gotten Balenciaga bag – but she is broke, her life online little more than social media smoke and mirrors. “Influencers are being sent a bunch of free merch, but maybe they can’t pay rent,” says Sennott. “I’m not saying they have the worst problems of anyone in the world. But part of what we wanted to show is that everyone is trying to present as doing better than they actually are, and pull back the curtain.” Variety pondered why we don’t actually see the content that Tallulah makes on screen, but Sennott didn’t think it was necessary. “No one wants to watch 30 minutes of someone editing a TikTok,” she says. Besides, “you see [Odessa] walk on camera and you go, yeah: that’s an It-girl! She just carries the charisma. I’m like, I don’t give a shit if she’s selling tinned fish or if she has a podcast!”
As well as its on-the-ball observations, I Love LA is fabulously funny, often spit-out-your-coffee absurd, and has a lot of heart to boot. Picking out hilarious moments is tough – because there are so many – but the unmasking of an influencer as a “prison nepo baby” whose family used to own Rikers Island jail is high on the list, as is a meltdown that takes place to the sound of the much-memed All Star by Smash Mouth. In an episode inspired by a super-painful medical emergency that Sennott suffered in real life, Maia pretends to be Jewish to jump the queue at the hospital for “open-toe surgery”. Very Curb Your Enthusiasm, but also extremely Rachel Sennott, who has often been mistaken for being Jewish, perhaps fuelled by Shiva Baby (she is, in fact, from a Catholic family of Irish and Italian descent). Elsewhere, the friendship at the centre of the series is frequently toxic and codependent, but also steeped in the kind of picked-up-where-we-left-off warmth that only old friends can have. “I think you see the beauty of [Maia and Tallulah’s] relationship, too,” she says. “I hope it’s not just frenemies vibes!”
The transition from film to TV was a learning curve, aided by the likes of Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers, Succession), who was an executive producer and directed two of the episodes. But it was a challenge that Sennott clearly rose to, along with the rest of the cast. “I could shout out every single person,” she beams. “There were no weak links. Everyone shines.” And, of course, she shines too, drawing on everything that has brought her to this moment to give a lead performance that’s as heartbreaking as it is side-splitting.
How does she feel about the city that made it all possible? “I’ve been there for five years, which is when everyone says it starts to get fabulous – and goddamn is it fabulous!” she says. “So, yes – now I do love LA!”
