The performer appears on the video call and right away begins an explanation. “Apologies for the delay!” she says, sounding genuinely remorseful. Although she's only slightly delayed, she wants to explain. “I tend to talk too much during calls. I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Luckily, in this context, this is just what is ideal to encounter. Moreover, it’s fairly predictable. Viewers who know her boldly queer and brash project titled Bottoms—which she co-wrote with Emma Seligman and starred in with her friend Ayo Edebiri—will already know that she has much to say, whether on roles, intimacy, or the pros of forming a high-school fight club. Furthermore, by the end her new seasonal HBO series titled I Love LA, viewers realize that she holds even more insights regarding the challenges of young adulthood (At 30, she represents an honorary member for this generation, on the cusp skilled for straddling different age groups).
Influences and Creative Vision
The comparisons to the iconic series Girls can’t be avoided and the actress readily acknowledges enthusiastic, naming it together with the classic series, Issa Rae’s show and Atlanta as inspirations for I Love LA, which follows the travails of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend and fledgling agent Maia. Perhaps, the largest influence on concept was reserved for the popular sitcom, that show focusing on an up-and-coming celebrity navigating in a corrupt entertainment industry (choice quote: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She started watching it throughout lockdown, became “hooked”, and chose to put her own twist on it “for the girls and the gays”.
“My aim was to focus on digital fame over traditional entertainment, as my own beginnings were on the web,” she says. The inspiration for the series came—to some extent—from personal, at first rocky, relocation to Los Angeles and from her astrological phase, a popular phenomenon for enthusiasts. This represented an era that saw her grasp major life lessons, in her career and in private life. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she says. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Starting Out
Brought up in New England, Sennott started creating and acting comedy while studying performance at NYU’s Tisch. “I went through all the proper channels to try to perform, and they weren’t gelling,” she says. “Every campus humor group turned me down after tryouts.” “Theatre productions at school also didn’t accept me. “I wondered why I was even there at all.”
She took matters into her own hands, appearing at amateur nights with Ayo and sharing hysterical (and distinctly) weird online content online. A particular video, Baby Cult, depicted several females obsessively fixated on having babies; a different one imagined being employed at the brand Hollister as like being caught in a scary movie. Interestingly, she encountered Emma through the university’s film scene and ultimately starring in her first film, Shiva Baby, a stressful comedy set at a Jewish wake with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. A recurring idea of her path, she says, has been people her own age offering opportunities, instead of established gatekeepers. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “They were not involved”, she repeats, continuing with a laugh: “They don’t want us to win.”
Rising Success
Individuals who were skeptical regarding her earlier will surely be kicking themselves today. In what she describes as a “wild, full-circle” development, she seems to have created the perfect project. In 2019 she uploaded a video called about Los Angeles online, in which she mocked Hollywood trailers (“Everyone’s hooked on something”). Six years on, she’s the co-showrunner (with Emma Barrie) of a series about LA residents managing benefits of online celebrity (such as socializing at Elijah Wood’s house) with downsides (your client being suspected of being a drug-addled thief, and potentially becoming a “brand unsafe” pariah). It would be simple to produce a series about online fame that was overly idealized—or, more problematic, one that belittled at the characters. The series avoids both, resulting in a depiction of affluent young adult existence that’s frank about the grot and the glamour.
Empathetic Approach
“Many programs portray youth and online life with disdain and mockery,” 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
