The performer enters the digital interview and immediately starts an apology. “Apologies for the delay!” she says, seeming genuinely regretful. Although she's only slightly late, she wants to justify. “I tend to talk too much during calls. “Previous discussions went over, and I realized I talk too much!” Thankfully, during an interview, that’s exactly what is ideal to encounter. Moreover, it’s pretty unsurprising. Viewers who know the fearlessly queer and brash project titled Bottoms—that Sennott penned with the director and starred in alongside her friend Ayo Edebiri—can understand that she holds plenty to say, whether on identity, intimacy, or the appeal of forming a teen combat group. And, once you finish her latest seasonal HBO series titled I Love LA, viewers realize that she carries additional thoughts about the struggles of Gen Z life (At 30, she is a relatable figure to younger audiences, straddling eras with a knack for straddling both generations).
Guiding Lights and Artistic Direction
Parallels to Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking show naturally arise and Sennott admits to being enthusiastic, referencing the show together with the HBO hit, Issa Rae’s show and Donald Glover’s series as guides for the project, which tracks the struggles of online personality Tallulah and ally who is also fledgling talent manager portrayed by Sennott. Perhaps, the biggest influence on concept went to the HBO series, that HBO sitcom focusing on a rising Hollywood star making his way in a corrupt LA scene (memorable line: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She started watching it amid lockdown, became “hooked”, and resolved 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 idea for this project emerged—to some extent—from personal, initially rocky, relocation to LA and from her astrological phase, a popular phenomenon for astrology heads. This represented an era that included her learn some big life lessons, work-wise and in private life. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she recalls. “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 …”
Early Beginnings
Brought up in the East Coast, 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 states. “I tried out for all the NYU comedy groups, and got rejected from all of them. “None of the university plays cast me either.” “It left me questioning my purpose and place.”
Sennott took matters into her own hands, taking the stage at open mics with Edebiri and posting hilarious (and distinctly) weird skits on the internet. One, Baby Cult, depicted characters fetishistically fixated on motherhood; another imagined working at the preppy clothing store Hollister as like being stuck in a scary movie. Interestingly, she connected with Seligman through the university’s film scene and ultimately appearing in her first film, Shiva Baby, a tense comedy set at a funeral gathering with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her path, she explains, has been people her own age offering opportunities, rather than the industry at large. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “Definitely not them”, she confirms, continuing amusedly: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Rising Success
Anyone who were skeptical about her previously will surely be regretting it now. In what she describes as a “incredibly circular” story, she has achieved the perfect project. In 2019 she shared content called about Los Angeles on social media, in which she mocked Hollywood trailers (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Six years on, she’s a lead creator (with the co-writer) of a series about LA residents juggling benefits of internet fame (such as celebrating at a famous actor’s house) with its pitfalls (your associate being labeled as being a intoxicated criminal, and potentially becoming a unreliable pariah). Some could easy to make a program about digital influence that was horribly idealized—or, worse, one that punched down at the characters. I Love LA does neither, creating a representation of affluent millennial life that’s frank about the chaos 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 comments. “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
