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Rachel Sennott appears on the video call and right away starts an excuse. “Oh my God – I’m sorry!” she exclaims, appearing genuinely remorseful. Despite being only a couple of minutes late, she wants to clarify. “I tend to talk too much during calls. “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Thankfully, for a writer, this is just what one hopes to hear. Additionally, it’s fairly expected. Anyone familiar with the fearlessly openly gay and unapologetically crass film Bottoms—that Sennott collaborated on with Emma Seligman and appeared in with collaborator The Bear’s standout—can already know that Sennott holds a lot to share, be it on gender, relationships, or the appeal of creating a youth fight club. Plus, by the end her latest multi-episode program I Love LA, it is clear that she holds even more insights regarding the challenges of Gen Z life (At 30, Sennott represents a bridge for this generation, on the cusp skilled for bridging millennials and Gen Z).

Guiding Lights and Creative Vision

Parallels to Lena Dunham’s Girls are inevitable and Sennott admits to being an admirer, citing the show alongside Sex and the City, Issa Rae’s show and Atlanta as influences for her series, which follows the travails of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend who is also fledgling agent Sennott’s character. Perhaps, the largest spot on the moodboard belonged to Entourage, that show depicting an emerging Hollywood star making his way in a corrupt entertainment industry (memorable line: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She discovered it during COVID-19, became “obsessed”, and chose to add a fresh perspective on it “for the girls and the gays”.

“I sought to highlight online platforms as the new industry, since my professional journey launched there,” she says. The inspiration for I Love LA emerged—partly—from personal, at first rocky, relocation to LA and from the astrological phase, a frequently discussed occurrence for followers. That period marked an era that saw her learn some big insights, work-wise and individually. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she recalls. “Settling in LA during my mid-twenties brought calm, but soon everything unraveled.” “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”

Humble Origins

Raised in the East Coast, the star started creating and acting humor 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 says. “Every campus humor group turned me down after tryouts.” “Theatre productions at school also didn’t accept me. “It left me questioning my purpose and place.”

Sennott took matters into her own hands, taking the stage at open mics with Edebiri and sharing uproarious (and very) unconventional online content digitally. One, titled Baby Cult, depicted a group of women fetishistically drawn to motherhood; a different one envisioned being employed at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being trapped in a horror film. Interestingly, she met Emma through campus film circles and ended up featuring in her initial project, Shiva Baby, an anxious comedy set at a Jewish wake with shades of the intense thriller. The central motif of her journey, she says, has been people her own age giving her a shot, rather than traditional networks. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “They were not involved”, she emphasizes, stating humorously: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”

Rising Success

Anyone who had doubts regarding her then will surely be regretting it currently. In what she labels a “incredibly circular” development, she seems to have achieved the perfect project. Previously she shared a video titled “it’s LA” on the internet, in which she parodied movie previews (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Now, she’s a lead creator (with the co-writer) of a comedy about city dwellers juggling benefits of online celebrity (such as socializing at a famous actor’s house) with drawbacks (your friend being labeled as being a substance-abusing criminal, and perhaps becoming a unreliable pariah). It would be easy to produce a series about digital influence that was extremely idealized—or, even less favorable, one that belittled at the characters. I Love LA steers clear of each, resulting in a portrait of privileged twentysomething existence that’s candid about the mess 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