The star enters the online meeting and right away launches into an excuse. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, appearing really remorseful. Although she's only slightly delayed, she needs to explain. “I have such a problem, because I’m a yapper on the phone. “Previous discussions went over, and I realized I talk too much!” Thankfully, in this context, this is precisely what one hopes to encounter. Besides, it’s fairly unsurprising. Viewers who have seen the unapologetically openly gay and unapologetically crass movie Bottoms—which Sennott penned with the director and featured in together with her friend The Bear’s standout—can already know that Sennott holds a lot to say, be it about gender, intimacy, or the merits of starting a youth brawl society. Furthermore, once you finish her recent multi-episode HBO series I Love LA, it becomes obvious that the star holds even more insights on the darker side of modern youth (As a millennial, Sennott serves as an honorary member of the gang, a tale-end millennial with a knack for straddling both generations).
Guiding Lights and Artistic Direction
The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls can’t be avoided and Sennott readily acknowledges enthusiastic, referencing the show in addition to Sex and the City, Insecure and Atlanta as influences for the project, which follows the struggles of a social media star Tallulah and ally and new agent Sennott’s character. However, the biggest presence on creative vision went to the HBO series, that program depicting an emerging Hollywood star navigating in a corrupt entertainment industry (memorable line: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). Sennott discovered it during COVID-19, became “hooked”, and chose to put her own twist on it “targeting women and LGBTQ+ viewers”.
“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she explains. The concept for this project came—in part—from personal, originally rocky, move to LA and from her saturn return, a much-talked-about phenomenon for astrology heads. That period marked a time that included her learn some big life lessons, work-wise and individually. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she says. “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 …”
Humble Origins
Raised in Connecticut, the star started developing and showcasing humor while studying acting at a prestigious arts school. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she says. “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. And I just felt like, what am I doing here?”
She seized control, taking the stage at live shows with her friend and sharing hysterical (and decidedly) bizarre online content on the internet. One, titled Baby Cult, centered on a group of women obsessively fixated on motherhood; a different one portrayed being employed at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being stuck in a scary movie. In a neat twist of fate, she encountered Emma through campus film circles and ultimately starring in her initial project, titled Shiva Baby, an anxious film set at a religious event with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. A recurring idea of her path, she says, has been peers offering opportunities, as opposed to established gatekeepers. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “Not the gatekeepers”, she emphasizes, adding with a laugh: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Manifesting Dreams
Anyone who questioned regarding her previously will likely be feeling foolish today. In what she labels a “incredibly circular” development, she has achieved her dream vehicle. In 2019 she shared content named on LA life online, in which she lampooned Hollywood trailers (“Everyone’s hooked on something”). Now, she’s the co-showrunner (with the co-writer) of a show about Angelenos juggling benefits of digital stardom (such as partying at a famous actor’s house) with its pitfalls (your associate being suspected of being a drug-addled stealer, and possibly becoming a risky persona non grata). One might tempting to create a program about digital influence that was horribly idealized—or, even less favorable, one that belittled at its subjects. The series steers clear of each, resulting in a portrait of advantaged twentysomething living that’s honest about the chaos and the shine.
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
