The performer joins the online meeting and immediately starts an excuse. “Oh my God – I’m sorry!” she states, seeming truly regretful. She is only a couple of minutes late, she needs to clarify. “I tend to talk too much during calls. I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Thankfully, for a writer, this is exactly what you want to experience. Besides, it’s fairly expected. Viewers who have seen her fearlessly LGBTQ+ and unapologetically crass film titled Bottoms—which she co-wrote with the director and starred in together with her friend the talented actress—can already know that Sennott possesses plenty to say, whether on roles, intimacy, or the pros of starting a teen brawl society. And, once you finish her recent eight-part HBO series I Love LA, it is clear that the star has further insights on the struggles of modern youth (Now in her thirties, Sennott is a bridge to younger audiences, on the cusp adept for connecting different age groups).
Guiding Lights and Creative Vision
The comparisons to the iconic series Girls are inevitable and Sennott is an admirer, citing the show together with Sex and the City, Insecure and Atlanta as influences for I Love LA, which details the journey of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and ally who is also new representative Maia. However, the most significant spot on the moodboard belonged to the HBO series, the show about an emerging Hollywood star navigating in a corrupt LA scene (memorable line: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). She discovered it during COVID-19, became “hooked”, and decided to add a fresh perspective on it “for the girls and the gays”.
“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she explains. The inspiration for I Love LA originated—partly—from her own, originally fractious, move to Tinseltown and from the saturn return, a popular event for astrology heads. That period marked an era that saw her learn some big insights, in her career and personally. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” 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…”
Starting Out
Brought up in Connecticut, Sennott commenced writing and performing humor while enrolled in performance at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she says. “Every campus humor group turned me down after tryouts.” “None of the university plays cast me either.” And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
She took matters into her own hands, performing at live shows with her friend and posting hilarious (and distinctly) weird comedy videos online. A particular video, titled Baby Cult, followed several females fetishistically fixated on motherhood; another envisioned being employed at the preppy clothing store Hollister as akin to being stuck in a horror film. Interestingly, she connected with Emma through the university’s film scene and ended up starring in her directorial debut, Shiva Baby, an anxious dramedy set at a Jewish wake with hints of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her journey, she says, has been contemporaries giving her a shot, instead of established gatekeepers. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “They were not involved”, she repeats, continuing amusedly: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Career Breakthrough
Those who questioned about Sennott then will likely be regretting it currently. As part of she describes as a “incredibly circular” story, she has manifested an ideal role. A few years back she uploaded a video called “it’s LA” on social media, in which she parodied Hollywood trailers (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Six years on, she’s executive producer (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 associate being labeled as being a substance-abusing stealer, and possibly becoming a unreliable pariah). One might tempting to make a series about internet celebrity that was overly aspirational—or, worse, one that mocked at those depicted. The series does neither, resulting in a portrait of privileged twentysomething living that’s frank about the mess and the appeal.
Empathetic Approach
“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
