The star joins the online meeting and right away starts an excuse. “Apologies for the delay!” she states, sounding genuinely remorseful. Despite being only a couple of minutes delayed, she needs to clarify. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Thankfully, for a writer, that’s exactly what is ideal to experience. Additionally, it’s quite unsurprising. Anyone who know her fearlessly queer and outspoken film Bottoms—that Sennott collaborated on with Emma Seligman and featured in with collaborator The Bear’s standout—will already know that Sennott holds a lot to discuss, whether on identity, sex, or the merits of starting a high-school brawl society. Furthermore, after watching the recent multi-episode show titled I Love LA, it is clear that the star holds further insights on the darker side of Gen Z life (Now in her thirties, she serves as an honorary member for this generation, straddling eras skilled for connecting both generations).
Inspirations and Creative Vision
Parallels to the iconic series Girls are inevitable and Sennott is a fan, referencing it in addition to the HBO hit, Insecure and Atlanta as guides for I Love LA, which follows the travails of an influencer played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend who is also aspiring agent Maia. However, the largest influence on the moodboard belonged to the HBO series, the show depicting a rising celebrity navigating in a corrupt Hollywood (choice quote: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). She discovered it amid lockdown, became “hooked”, and chose to put her own twist on it “targeting women and LGBTQ+ viewers”.
“My aim was to focus on digital fame over traditional entertainment, as my own beginnings were on the web,” she explains. The concept for the series emerged—to some extent—from her own, initially difficult, relocation to Tinseltown and from her saturn return, a much-talked-about event for followers. It was a time that saw her learn some big life lessons, professionally and individually. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she admits. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”
Starting Out
Growing up in Connecticut, the star commenced writing and performing humor while pursuing performance 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. And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
She took matters into her own hands, taking the stage at live shows with her friend and sharing hilarious (and decidedly) bizarre skits on the internet. One, titled Baby Cult, centered on characters fetishistically obsessed with having babies; another portrayed being employed at the brand Hollister as similar to being caught in a thriller. In a neat twist of fate, she connected with Seligman through campus film circles and eventually featuring in her first film, Shiva Baby, a stressful comedy set at a Jewish wake with hints of the Safdie brothers’ movie. A recurring idea of her journey, she explains, has been peers giving her a shot, rather than traditional networks. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “They were not involved”, she confirms, stating amusedly: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Rising Success
Anyone who had doubts regarding her then will surely be feeling foolish today. In what she calls a “incredibly circular” development, she seems to have manifested an ideal role. In 2019 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 the co-writer) of a comedy about city dwellers juggling benefits of online celebrity (such as celebrating at a famous actor’s house) with its pitfalls (your friend being accused of being a intoxicated criminal, and potentially becoming a “brand unsafe” outcast). Some could tempting to produce a program about digital influence that was extremely aspirational—or, worse, one that punched down at its subjects. I Love LA does neither, creating a representation of privileged young adult life that’s honest about the chaos and the glamour.
Empathetic Approach
“Numerous series present younger generations and digital culture in a derogatory manner,” 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
