The jeans were giving Y2K. They were giving mall air-conditioning and bad choices at the food court. The denim was lightly distressed, the rise dangerously low. Rachel Sennott was feeling it.
“It’s a commitment,” she said, as she turned a hip toward the dressing room mirror. “But I can do it.” Then she went to try on a black Calvin Klein number with big villainess energy because, she said, she had a lot of weddings to attend this summer.
This was on a humid afternoon in late July, and Sennott, an actress, writer and comedian, was strolling in and out of vintage stores in the Dimes Square neighborhood of Manhattan, a backdrop for an episode of her new HBO show, “I Love L.A.” (The title is somewhat ironic, which helps explain the Manhattan locale.)
Sennott (“Shiva Baby,” “Bottoms”) is an online and indie film darling. As she traversed a crosswalk — sunglasses atop her head, the California tiara — a pair of admiring young women went weak-kneed.
“Hi! We love you,” one called to her.
“Your outfits are so cute!” Sennott called back.
Sennott, 29, created and cowrites “I Love L.A.,” which premieres in November. She also stars as Maya, a wannabe talent manager neck-deep in a quarter-life crisis. Sennott, who treats astrology as an accepted article of faith, used another term: “the Saturn return,” which refers to the period in one’s late 20s when the planet arrives, in its orbit around the sun, back where it was when the person was born. Sennott described it as a tumultuous time when everything you thought you had learned comes back to punch you in the face.
“When you get to the end of your 20s, you have to pick if you’re going to keep the life you have or if you’re going to blow it all up and start fresh,” she said.
But if you’re Sennott, an artist who fluently combines ambition, mess, flair and the more awkward forms of desire, maybe you do both.
SENNOTT IS BY ALMOST any definition a “cool girl,” but she is generous with it.
“She’s cool without being exclusive,” said Amy Gravitt, an HBO executive vice president who helped to shape the series. “She wants to bring everybody along for the ride.” Or as the writer and actress Ayo Edebiri (“The Bear”), a longtime friend, put it: “She’s everyone’s No. 1 cheerleader.”
This was apparent over a pre-shopping lunch at a nearby cafe. She was ardently supportive of my blah order, a green salad with added avocado. “Any time I don’t add to a salad, I’m regretful after,” she riffed. “I mean, what this salad could have been … Yes, with an avocado! Change everything!”
When the server brought her salmon, she was equally effusive: “Oh my God, stunning!” It was impossible not to mirror her enthusiasm or her Zillennial vocal tics — “kind of,” “whatever,” “looooove” — and tendency to emphasize nearly every syllable.
Sennott has been bringing people onto her squad from way back. Growing up in small-town Connecticut, she recruited her four siblings for music videos, comedy shorts and Christmas plays. As a theater student at New York University, she rejected the local zeitgeist that encouraged young people to shrug off or downplay their ambitions. The writer and director Emma Seligman, who also went to N.Y.U., recalled that as an undergrad, Sennott used to carry around typed lists of one-year, three-year and five-year plans.
“She’s shown you can be a cool girl and work extremely hard at the same time,” Seligman said.
Edebiri met Sennott early in their freshman year. “She amazed me with how boundless and fearless she seemed,” Edebiri wrote in an email. Sennott dragged Edebiri to open mic nights around the city. At first, they embarrassed themselves. Then they embarrassed themselves a little less.
While Sennott was establishing her stand-up voice (unvarnished, provocative, a hot-girls-with-I.B.S. meme come to life), she was also acting in student films, including a short by Seligman that eventually became the 2020 indie feature “Shiva Baby.” This was Sennott’s breakout, and that break might have been bigger had pandemic lockdowns not prevented a planned South by Southwest premiere and other promotional efforts. The release of “Bottoms,” the 2023 indie that she made with Seligman and Edebiri, was also hampered, in this case by the Hollywood guild strikes.
“My entire experience in this industry, the world has been really chaotic,” Sennott said. “It’s forced me to be adaptable.”
In the years between the movies, Sennott acted in other projects, mainstream and indie — a Kyra Sedgwick sitcom, the horror comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” (She taped that audition at an Airbnb, and her screams horrified the neighbors.) She also radically expanded her Twitter following, with jokes and occasional thirst traps that presented a lightly maniacal version of her daily life.
“I’m a deeply emotional person, Cancer moon, and I have a lot of feelings,” she said.
Stand-up and social media gave her places to put them. But in 2023, she deleted her account. She felt like she was performing an older version of herself for the likes and that it was limiting her growth.
Around this time, HBO requested a meeting, and Sennott came prepared with two series pitches. Gravitt wasn’t much interested in either — one was about a young woman who talks to A.T.M.s — but something Sennott said about the Saturn return stood out to her. Gravitt encouraged her to write a pilot that eventually became “I Love L.A.” (I asked Sennott, mostly joking, if HBO greenlit the show to atone for putting her in its execrable showbiz fable “The Idol.” She was politic: “I loved my character.”)
Sennott used to make fun of Los Angeles online. One post: “Moving to L.A. to get the lobotomy of my dreams.” Another, a fake trailer for an L.A. movie: “What? It’s L.A.! I’m addicted to drugs. We all are.” But by the time “I Love L.A.” was in the offing, she actually lived there — she often feels out of her depth, she said, and keeps getting into car accidents.
So she made a show about that, about flailing careers and about how being extremely online can mess up a girl’s dopamine response. “I Love L.A.” is a kind of anti-“Friends” — there are friends around, but they’re largely toxic. “It’s the first show that I have seen that skewers the younger generation in the right way,” said Jordan Firstman, a longtime friend of Sennott’s and an actor on the show.
Though Sennott has other projects in the offing, including cowriting a Heidi Fleiss biopic, “I Love L.A.” is her first as a solo creator. And she pushed herself to direct an episode, even though her one previous experience as a director (an entirely incoherent student production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit”) had gone poorly. So this all felt very new, but she was determined to do it her own way.
“She’d lead the production meetings with a pink binder with horses on it,” said Emma Barrie, Sennott’s co-showrunner. “I was like, Yes! This is the vibe this show needs.”
But in its themes, the show remains very much aligned with Sennott’s previous work and with her life. Maya is not exactly Sennott, but in her ambition and her anxiety and her control-freakiness, she is not far off. And the character filled the Twitter-sized void in Sennott’s soul.
“When the show got picked up, I was like, Oh my God, I found the place to channel all this,” she said. “Hopefully people will relate to the new chapter of who I am, which, by the way, it’s like, same exact bitch. Like, it’s not that different.”
I NEXT SAW SENNOTT on set in Dimes Square a few days later. An excessive heat warning was in effect; the air quality was a disaster. But Sennott, in a ribbed black two-piece trimmed in black feathers, seemed zippy, unruffled and, thanks to the miracle of setting spray, still matte. In the scene, her character had to puff on a cigarette, then film a TikTok. The props department had given her an herbal smoke.
“No nicotine?” she said as she passed, wobbling only slightly in six-inch flowered platforms. “I don’t even get a little treat.”
This was the episode Sennott directed. As the hours lengthened and the sweat pooled on everyone but the performers, she often pulled herself out of a scene to confer quietly with a camera operator and then go right back in, all big gestures and vocal fry. She seemed in her element, even as her iced coffees wouldn’t stay iced and she kept confusing her prop phone for her real phone. It was a commitment, but she could do it.
When Sennott had first pitched “I Love L.A.,” she’d thought she had her life all figured out. Then Saturn returned for her, too. But honestly, that felt right.
“I was like, Oh my God, it’s chaos again and I feel out of control,” she said. “But then part of me was like, Oh thank God — like, I’m not ready to be done with the chaos. I need a little bit more.”
Video camera operator: Grant Spanier
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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