True Whitaker wanted to nail her audition for “I Love LA,” or, at the time, the “Untitled Rachel Sennott Project.”
She felt a strong connection to the role and had dreamed of working with Sennott, the show’s creator and star. But on the day when she needed to record her audition, her friends were all hitting the beach, so she only had one person to turn to for help working through the scene: her Academy-Award winning father.
It was the first time True and her dad, Forest Whitaker, had worked together on an audition, and she said they went through the materials for hours. By the end, she says they both felt confident she’d book it.
“He was like, ‘It’d be embarrassing if you don’t get it because she seriously reflects a part of you and I really feel like you could take it there,’ ” she said. “And I was like, ‘I think so, too.’ I’ve never felt so strongly about a character. I felt seen in a way.”
The role in question was for Alani Marcus, a lead character in the HBO series who is the daughter of a prominent Hollywood filmmaker. Of course, there are parallels between Whitaker and Alani with their parentage and privilege — Whitaker doesn’t deny that. But the connection extends far beyond the nepo baby label. The “bones” of the actor and the character are similar, she said.
“She was just like a light version of me, or a version of me who has dealt with their trauma, pretty well, pretty positively. She’s supposed to be a Cancer too [like me], but she might not be as teary. She seems to be so optimistic all the time, like a cockeyed optimist,” she said.
“And obviously I’m not that dark and scary, but, you know, I’ve gone through life, I’m 27. I live in New York and it’s pretty scary over here,” she added, laughing.
“I Love LA” premiered earlier this month and follows a group of late 20-something creatives navigating the chaos of their lives and careers in Los Angeles (HBO recently renewed the series for a second season). Sennott plays Maia, who works in talent management and goes on to manage her friend, the mercurial influencer Tallulah (Odessa A’zion). Jordan Firstman plays Charlie, an enterprising celebrity stylist. Alani rounds out the group as the breezy, spiritually minded friend who, unlike everyone else, is not grinding to advance her career.
Whitaker said the cast and creatives initially thought of the show as “ ‘Entourage’ for ‘it’ girls.” It also taps into and reflects “how ridiculous most of your 20s are and also how ridiculous the world around us is,” Whitaker said.
The actor, speaking over a Zoom call from her New York City apartment, said she was drawn to the role when she was helping a friend film an audition for Tallulah by reading Alani’s lines off-camera. The scene focused on a debate about which hot spot bakery to get Maia’s birthday cake from — Milk Bar or Sweet Lady Jane. Whitaker recognized that the character’s cadence, the passion with which she spoke and even Alani’s bakery preferences mirrored her own.
Alani is “obviously a Sweet Lady Jane girl,” Whitaker said, noting that her late mother, Keisha Nash Whitaker, marked big occasions with cakes from the bakery, including the baby shower when she was expecting True, and True’s first birthday.
The level of understanding she had of Alani, and Whitaker’s desire to humanize her, made a character who could have been seen as unrelatable, ignorant or even irritating into a delightfully self-aware fan favorite.
Alani is first seen in the series getting out of the backseat of an SUV, asking her driver to wait there while the group is “just gonna do, like, one lap” around the Silver Lake Reservoir. Moments later, she implores Charlie to hire an “ugly guy” to do his taxes, and she brushes off a $10,000 payday Tallulah gets as “nothing.” Later in the series, she accidentally waltzes into a meeting at her dad’s production company and sits in as the “VP of creative projects” — a title even she admits is fake — and details a crazy childhood steeped in wealth and privilege (and somewhat absent parents).
In a separate call, Sennott applauded Whitaker’s ability to make the character so warm despite her lofty upbringing and out-of-touch worldview.
“She just brings so much heart to the character — a character that you could so easily judge or feel a type of way about,” Sennott said. “She just added a lot of heart and depth to Alani … It’s a difficult balance, but I feel like she really nailed it.”
Sennott said the character was initially supposed to be colder than the Alani in the final product, but after meeting with Whitaker, she found the actor to be “funny and sweet and warm, and you just love her no matter what she’s saying.” Sennott and the writers then adjusted the character to “capture some of her warmth and sincerity.”
Although she did admit she was “up to no good” as a high school student at Oakwood School in North Hollywood, Whitaker said her upbringing was not as wild as Alani’s, and she does not possess the character’s desire to coast off her surname. Still, Whitaker wasn’t hesitant to play with the trope of a rich L.A. kid benefiting from nepotism.
The only thing she questioned was whether playing the role was too on the nose, but she ultimately decided it was funny — and that she could pull it off well.
“I have lived as myself, as a ‘nepo baby,’ as the daughter of my father and my mother and so I understand that experience, and I also, similar to Alani, have no sort of shame in that,” she said. “I’m nothing but proud of my parents and so proud of my father for having such an influential career. He’s such an inspiration.”
The series’ fourth episode, released Sunday, reveals that Alani has a profound celebrity crush on Elijah Wood, star of the “Lord of the Rings” franchise. The crew is invited to a party at his home, but when they arrive, he’s nowhere to be found. That is until Maia and Alani ignore a sign to stay downstairs and find him hiding out in his bedroom watching YouTube videos on a big TV; the latter freaks out and leaves the room. After Alani regains her composure, they reenter and quickly befriend Wood, who plays an exaggerated, borderline agoraphobic version of himself. He suggests Alani and Maia put on robes to sit on his bed, leading the girls to mistake his odd yet warm vibe as an invitation for a threesome. It results in Wood having a frenzied breakdown as a clip of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” from “Shrek” plays in the background. (“We misread the situation,” Maia exclaims.)
When she got the script for the episode, Whitaker, who admits she “wasn’t a ‘Lord of the Rings’ girl growing up,” binged the movies, eager to pull off the antics in the scene. She also cooked up the idea to improvise some Elvish, the fictional language of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels. She was nervous — she clarifies she’s “not fluent” — but it was a choice that paid off, and the moment made it in the final cut. “I’ll always love you, Elijah!” she shouts in the language as Alani and Maia flee.
Whitaker said Wood was surprised — and impressed — by the improvisation. In a separate call, Wood said the addition of Elvish “blew my mind. What an incredible thing to bring to the scene.”
Wood, who said he typically shies away from playing any version of himself on screen, was interested in seeing the script after Sennott approached him because he was a fan of her prior work. When he saw what was on the page, he found it to be “undeniably funny.” Working with Sennott and Whitaker over the two days they shot their scenes was “a really fun environment for play,” he said. He commended Whitaker’s sharp comedic timing and the unique choices she made in her performance throughout the series.
“She plays a character that’s quite difficult to play — hyper confident, but not super intelligent. It’s difficult to play dim, because it can be really broad, but her work is so intelligent and so nuanced,” he said. “She’s really thinking about ways to elevate what she’s doing and play around in the context of that character. I love her work. She is one of the funniest parts of the show.”
Whitaker said she feels she has always been pretty funny — she credits her mother’s quick wit for that — but she still came into “I Love LA” with a tinge of anxiety, calling herself the “most green” actor in the main cast. But the supportive set environment helped her ease in and explore. The cast had become more than just collaborators, developing real, meaningful friendships over the course of filming the show. Whitaker apologized for a text message chiming in during our conversation: “The cast group chat is blowing me up,” she said.
Much of her experience with the series has been wish fulfillment, partly because she had manifested working with Sennott years before “I Love LA” was in development, but mostly because she had dreamed of being an actor since she was a kid. She had felt intimidated to approach acting in her early years because of her dad’s passion for the craft.
The elder Whitaker would tell her, “‘If you want to go into acting, you have to do it the right way and study. You’re not just going to be a person that’s like, ‘I’m going to act.’ That’s not a f— thing. It’s a f— art form and skill that you need to hone and learn the history of.’ ”
He would also advise her to be careful of what projects she took part in, noting that everything she would do would make up her archive, her legacy.
“I couldn’t think of any other project that would be more perfect for me for this moment,” Whitaker said. “It’s something that I’ll forever be so happy to be tied to.”
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