The star enters the online meeting and immediately launches into an excuse. “Apologies for the delay!” she states, seeming genuinely apologetic. She is only a couple of minutes late, she wants to clarify. “I have such a problem, because I’m a yapper on the phone. “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Fortunately, for a writer, this is precisely what one hopes to experience. Moreover, it’s quite expected. Viewers who have seen her unapologetically LGBTQ+ and brash film titled Bottoms—that Sennott collaborated on with the director and featured in alongside her friend Ayo Edebiri—can already know that Sennott holds plenty to say, ranging from on gender, intimacy, or the merits of starting a youth fight club. And, once you finish her new eight-part HBO series I Love LA, it becomes obvious that she has further perspectives on the challenges of modern youth (At 30, she represents a bridge to younger audiences, a tale-end millennial skilled for connecting both generations).
Guiding Lights and Artistic Direction
Likenesses to Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking show are inevitable and the actress admits to being an admirer, referencing the show in addition to the HBO hit, Insecure and Donald Glover’s series as influences for her series, which tracks the journey of an influencer Tallulah and close companion who is also aspiring representative portrayed by Sennott. Notably, the biggest influence on the moodboard went to Entourage, that HBO sitcom depicting an up-and-coming celebrity navigating in an often-seedy Hollywood (notable statement: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She discovered it throughout COVID-19, became “captivated”, and decided to add a fresh perspective 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 notes. The inspiration for I Love LA emerged—in part—from her own, at first fractious, move to Tinseltown and from the saturn return, a much-talked-about phenomenon for astrology heads. It was an era that saw her learn some big insights, work-wise 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. “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Early Beginnings
Growing up in Connecticut, the star began writing and performing humor while studying performance at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she states. “Every campus humor group turned me down after tryouts.” “Theatre productions at school also didn’t accept me. And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
She seized control, appearing at live shows with her friend and sharing hilarious (and distinctly) weird skits digitally. One, titled Baby Cult, followed characters intensely fixated on having babies; a different one envisioned working at the brand Hollister as akin to being trapped in a horror film. By chance, she connected with Seligman through NYU’s movie community and ended up appearing in her initial project, titled Shiva Baby, a stressful comedy set at a funeral gathering with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. A recurring idea of her path, she notes, has been contemporaries giving her a shot, as opposed to established gatekeepers. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “They were not involved”, she confirms, continuing amusedly: “They don’t want us to win.”
Manifesting Dreams
Anyone who were skeptical about her previously will certainly be regretting it today. In what she calls a “wild, full-circle” development, she seems to have created an ideal role. A few years back she uploaded a clip titled “it’s LA” on social media, in which she parodied film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Now, she’s a lead creator (with her partner) of a comedy about LA residents juggling advantages of digital stardom (such as socializing at a famous actor’s house) with downsides (your associate being accused of being a substance-abusing thief, and possibly becoming a “brand unsafe” persona non grata). Some could simple to create a show about internet celebrity that was extremely aspirational—or, worse, one that mocked at its subjects. I Love LA avoids both, creating a representation of privileged young adult living that’s candid about the chaos and the shine.
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 observes. “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
