The performer joins the video call and immediately starts an apology. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she says, seeming really remorseful. She is only a couple of minutes behind, she wants to justify. “I tend to talk too much during calls. “Previous discussions went over, and I realized I talk too much!” Fortunately, in this context, this is precisely what you want to hear. Additionally, it’s pretty unsurprising. Anyone who have seen the unapologetically openly gay and outspoken movie titled Bottoms—that she penned with Emma Seligman and featured in with her friend Ayo Edebiri—can understand that Sennott holds much to discuss, be it about gender, sex, or the appeal of creating a high-school combat group. Plus, once you finish the latest eight-part show I Love LA, it becomes obvious that she carries further thoughts about the darker side of modern youth (Now in her thirties, she is an honorary member for this generation, straddling eras adept for bridging both generations).
Inspirations and Creative Vision
The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls naturally arise and Sennott is enthusiastic, naming the show together with the HBO hit, the acclaimed comedy and Donald Glover’s series as guides for I Love LA, which tracks the travails of a social media star Tallulah and ally and aspiring talent manager portrayed by Sennott. However, the biggest spot on creative vision belonged to the popular sitcom, that HBO sitcom depicting an up-and-coming celebrity navigating in a gritty LA scene (choice quote: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). She discovered it throughout lockdown, became “hooked”, and chose to put her own twist 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 idea for I Love LA originated—in part—from firsthand, at first rocky, move to Los Angeles and from the astrological phase, a frequently discussed event for followers. This represented a time that saw her learn major insights, professionally and in private life. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she admits. “In my mid-20s, I moved to LA and got settled. And then I felt like everything started to just fall apart. “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”
Early Beginnings
Brought up in the East Coast, the star started developing and showcasing comedy while studying acting at NYU’s Tisch. “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. I tried out for all the NYU plays and didn’t make it into any of them. “It left me questioning my purpose and place.”
Sennott took matters into her own hands, taking the stage at live shows with Ayo and uploading hysterical (and decidedly) unconventional online content online. A particular video, Baby Cult, depicted a group of women obsessively obsessed with having babies; another imagined working at the brand Hollister as akin to being caught in a scary movie. By chance, she encountered Seligman through NYU’s movie community and eventually featuring in her initial project, Shiva Baby, a tense comedy set at a Jewish wake with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The big theme of her path, she says, has been people her own age offering opportunities, instead of traditional networks. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “Not the gatekeepers”, she emphasizes, continuing humorously: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Career Breakthrough
Anyone who questioned regarding Sennott earlier will surely be feeling foolish currently. As part of she calls a “wild, full-circle” development, she has manifested the perfect project. Previously she posted a clip titled about Los Angeles online, in which she parodied film promos (“Everyone’s hooked on something”). Years later, she’s a lead creator (with Emma Barrie) of a series about city dwellers managing the perks of digital stardom (such as partying at a celebrity’s house) with downsides (your associate being suspected of being a drug-addled thief, and possibly becoming a unreliable outcast). It would be easy to create a show about internet celebrity that was extremely aspirational—or, worse, one that mocked at its subjects. I Love LA does neither, creating a portrait of affluent millennial existence that’s candid about the chaos and the shine.
Empathetic Approach
“Many programs portray youth and online life with disdain and mockery,” 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
