The star joins the online meeting and right away starts an explanation. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, sounding truly regretful. Despite being only slightly delayed, she wants to justify. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Thankfully, during an interview, that’s precisely what one hopes to encounter. Besides, it’s pretty predictable. Viewers who have seen her unapologetically LGBTQ+ and outspoken movie Bottoms—which she penned with the director and featured in alongside collaborator The Bear’s standout—will already know that she possesses much to share, be it about gender, relationships, or the pros of creating a youth combat group. And, after watching her recent multi-episode program I Love LA, it is clear that the star holds additional thoughts about the darker side of Gen Z life (As a millennial, she serves as an honorary member to younger audiences, straddling eras adept for connecting millennials and Gen Z).
Guiding Lights and Storytelling Approach
Parallels to Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking show can’t be avoided and Sennott admits to being an admirer, citing the show alongside the classic series, Insecure and Atlanta as influences for her series, which tracks the journey of online personality Tallulah and her friend who is also aspiring agent Sennott’s character. Perhaps, the most significant presence on creative vision was reserved for the popular sitcom, that program about a rising Hollywood star navigating in a gritty Hollywood (choice quote: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). Sennott started watching it during the pandemic, became “captivated”, and decided 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 inspiration for I Love LA originated—partly—from firsthand, at first rocky, move to Tinseltown and from her cosmic event, a much-talked-about phenomenon for followers. It was a time that involved her learn major insights, work-wise and individually. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she recalls. “Settling in LA during my mid-twenties brought calm, but soon everything unraveled.” “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Early Beginnings
Growing up in Connecticut, Sennott began developing and showcasing stand-up while enrolled in acting at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “I went through all the proper channels to try to perform, and they weren’t gelling,” she states. “Every campus humor group turned me down after tryouts.” 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.”
She decided to act independently, appearing at amateur nights with Ayo and sharing hysterical (and decidedly) bizarre online content online. A particular video, titled Baby Cult, centered on characters fetishistically obsessed with motherhood; another portrayed working at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being trapped in a horror film. By chance, she encountered Emma through NYU’s movie community and ultimately appearing in her initial project, Shiva Baby, a tense dramedy set at a Jewish wake with hints of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her career, she says, has been peers offering opportunities, instead of the industry at large. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “Not the gatekeepers”, she repeats, stating humorously: “They don’t want us to win.”
Career Breakthrough
Those who were skeptical about Sennott earlier will surely be kicking themselves today. As part of she labels a “astonishingly complete” development, she has manifested the perfect project. In 2019 she shared a video called about Los Angeles on the internet, in which she parodied Hollywood trailers (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Years later, she’s the co-showrunner (with Emma Barrie) of a comedy about city dwellers managing advantages of digital stardom (such as celebrating at a celebrity’s house) with downsides (your associate being labeled as being a intoxicated criminal, and perhaps becoming a unreliable persona non grata). It would be easy to produce a show about internet celebrity that was extremely glamorous—or, worse, one that punched down at its subjects. This show does neither, creating a depiction of advantaged young adult existence that’s candid about the mess and the shine.
Nuanced Portrayal
“There have been a lot of shows that depict young people and their relationship to the internet in this very condescending, hateful way,” 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
