The star appears on the online meeting and at once begins an apology. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, appearing genuinely remorseful. Despite being only a bit late, she wants to explain. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Previous discussions went over, and I realized I talk too much!” Thankfully, in this context, this is exactly what one hopes to encounter. Besides, it’s pretty expected. Anyone familiar with the unapologetically LGBTQ+ and unapologetically crass movie titled Bottoms—which she co-wrote with her creative partner and featured in with her friend Ayo Edebiri—would be aware that she holds plenty to share, be it about roles, sex, or the merits of creating a high-school brawl society. Furthermore, once you finish the recent eight-part program I Love LA, it is clear that the star has additional perspectives regarding the darker side of young adulthood (At 30, Sennott represents a relatable figure to younger audiences, straddling eras adept for straddling both generations).
Guiding Lights and Creative Vision
Parallels to Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking show are inevitable and the actress admits to being enthusiastic, referencing it together with the HBO hit, Issa Rae’s show and Atlanta as influences for her series, which details the journey of online personality Tallulah and her friend and fledgling representative Sennott’s character. Notably, the most significant influence on the moodboard went to Entourage, the HBO sitcom depicting a rising Hollywood star navigating in an often-seedy Hollywood (memorable line: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). Sennott discovered it amid COVID-19, became “obsessed”, and chose to put her own twist 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 the series came—partly—from personal, originally fractious, transition to Tinseltown and from her cosmic event, a frequently discussed phenomenon for astrology heads. That period marked a phase that saw her understand major life lessons, work-wise and personally. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she admits. “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…”
Humble Origins
Brought up in the East Coast, Sennott began writing and performing humor while studying performance at NYU’s Tisch. “Despite trying every conventional route, I couldn’t find my footing,” she states. “Auditions for university comedy troupes led to universal rejection. “Theatre productions at school also didn’t accept me. And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
Sennott took matters into her own hands, performing at amateur nights with Ayo and uploading uproarious (and decidedly) weird skits digitally. A particular video, titled Baby Cult, centered on a group of women fetishistically obsessed with having babies; a different one portrayed being employed at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being caught in a thriller. In a neat twist of fate, she encountered Seligman through the university’s film scene and ultimately starring in her directorial debut, titled Shiva Baby, a stressful dramedy set at a Jewish wake with echoes of the intense thriller. The big theme of her journey, she notes, has been people her own age supporting her, rather than traditional networks. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “Not the gatekeepers”, she confirms, adding with a laugh: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Manifesting Dreams
Those who were skeptical about her earlier will likely be regretting it today. Through she describes as a “astonishingly complete” story, she seems to have created her dream vehicle. Previously she shared a video called on LA life on social media, in which she mocked film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Years later, she’s the co-showrunner (with the co-writer) of a comedy about Angelenos balancing benefits of internet fame (such as socializing at a famous actor’s house) with downsides (your client being accused of being a drug-addled thief, and perhaps becoming a risky outcast). It would be tempting to make a show about online fame that was horribly idealized—or, worse, one that mocked at the characters. This show does neither, creating a depiction of privileged twentysomething living that’s honest about the mess and the shine.
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
