Rachel Sennott first moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2020. She got a shit welcome.
Connecticut-born and NYU-bred, Sennott took the leap to the city of dreams the way any actor would hope to: with a TV gig booked and relocation costs covered. But the auspices ended there.
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“They put me up in this studio apartment in North Hollywood, and there’d been crazy fires. The sky was, like, orange-gray-brown,” she says. “I got out of my car at the apartment, and there was poop — human poop — out on the sidewalk. I was like, ‘L.A., here we come!’”
To be fair, her feelings about the West Coast were already in the toilet. She’d gone viral for a 2019 video she posted on Instagram captioned, “The trailer for any movie set in LA.” In it, a club beat pounds as she twirls around in a crop top, sunglasses and what looks to be a metal belt worn as a scarf. “It’s L.A.!” she says, laughing artificially. “I’m addicted to drugs. We all are. If you don’t have an eating disorder, get one, bitch!”
So for the first three years after she moved to the City of Angels, Sennott had one foot out the door. “I don’t live here. I’m going back,” she would tell herself — and she had the New York storage unit to prove it. Things just weren’t clicking: The sitcom that brought her there, ABC’s “Call Your Mother,” aired for one season in 2021 before it was canceled and got forgotten almost as quickly. Sennott had a movie in the works, the queer Jewish dramedy “Shiva Baby,” but she’d shot it in Brooklyn before her move, with her NYU classmate Emma Seligman directing. And beyond work struggles, the vibes in L.A. were just off.
“I felt really isolated and alone,” she says. “I was moving from Airbnb to Airbnb and feeling crazy and far away from my friends.” Her eyes grow wide, and she begins to laugh: “Especially if you’re a bad driver, it’s horrible. It’s so horrible and dangerous! Every time I’m on the highway, I literally feel like I’m gonna crash. Every time. I shouldn’t feel like I’m going to get in a car accident every day!”
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Sennott is saying all this over Zoom from a cozy apartment in Los Feliz — she never did move back to New York. She’s pledged her allegiance to the West Coast by making “I Love L.A.,” the new HBO comedy series with Sennott, 30, at the center as creator, executive producer and star, playing an aspiring talent manager whose personal and professional lives get upended after a surprise reunion with her influencer frenemy. Sennott poured into the eight-episode series the internet addiction, sexual comedy and self-satirizing that defined her 20s and made her so relatable to her zillennial cohorts. As a result, the show feels like a generational text — perhaps the “Girls” of the 2020s — in that it’s a slightly heightened portrait of what it can be like as a young person to live and struggle in the titular city.
And yet, just talking with Sennott, it’s clear how deep her East Coast roots go. They show up the most in the pace at which she expresses herself, yet it’s not as simple as being a New Yorker who talks fast. Sennott delivers the self-deprecating admission about her bad driving in a way that feels like dialogue written for a character you’ve known for years. But she’s also speaking for the masses of fired-up youth who push back on the idea that society should be structured around cars — and who also can’t be bothered to take driver’s ed more seriously.
The strength of Sennott’s voice eventually ironed out any of her worries about “making it.” The fan base she developed over her years of posting comedy on social media helped “Shiva Baby” receive a level of word-of-mouth attention that would have been otherwise hard to achieve given its scrappy budget and pandemic release in 2021. The following year, she further established herself as an indie film darling with the A24 horror-comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” And with the lesbian teen sex comedy “Bottoms” in 2023, Sennott got her first chance to prove her chops as a writer, penning the teen comedy with Seligman in addition to starring opposite Ayo Edebiri, another NYU classmate turned star. She’s been booked and busy, in front of the camera and behind it, ever since.
Sennott’s reputation as a rising actor and creative is intricately tied up with the East Coast. It shows up in everything from her humor to the company she keeps to her résumé — each of those early projects was produced and set in the state of New York with the exception of “Bottoms,” which was shot in Louisiana but made in collaboration with her New York friends. Even her Wikipedia page suggests that she lives there part time.
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So what drove Sennott to make L.A. the backdrop of her first effort as a solo creator? To put it plainly: She grew up a little. Like many of her peers, Sennott experienced a bit of Peter Pan syndrome after feeling robbed of a chunk of her youth. “A lot of what I felt like should have been fun years were during COVID, and then there was the strike. I was chasing the high of something I missed out on, and New York symbolized that,” she says. “I’ve always had this thing where if I’m feeling unhappy, I’m like, ‘I need to move and change everything.’ Anytime I would go back to New York for work, I would be like, ‘This is what I need to be doing. I need to break up with my boyfriend and move back and drink every night.’ And then I would do that for a week and be like, ‘Wait a second. I need to go back to L.A. and be in my backyard.’”
As it turns out, Sennott needed that backyard in order to come into her own as an artist. Now, she’s able to see L.A. for what it truly offers: access to the boardrooms and wine bars and house parties where real business gets done in entertainment — plus enough space to stretch your arms out and process it all.
Right before the pandemic hit, Sennott experienced one of her first rites of passage in Hollywood — schmoozing with executives in a round of meetings that go absolutely nowhere. She and Seligman made a trip together to pitch a nascent version of “Bottoms” to what felt like every studio in town. “People were like, ‘That sounds amazing. Send us a script,’” she says. “We left being like, ‘We crushed it. We basically just did a bidding war.’ Obviously, everyone passed or just never replied.”
At least she got a good joke out of it. The “It’s L.A.” video was one of many posts that made Sennott a micro-celebrity on the internet. She had hundreds of thousands of followers on X, then still called Twitter, before she deleted her account in 2023, and has close to 1 million on Instagram, where she still posts, though not as frequently or as meme-heavily as before.
That part of Sennott’s life was a legitimate boon to her career. Her lane was to make people laugh and look hot doing it, and it helped her book stand-up gigs and industry attention before she ever made a movie. But it was real work, even if she wasn’t taking brand deals or making money from it. And it took a toll.
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Sennott gained her following “in this period where I was not feeling good about myself at all, and I saw people who, online, seemed like nothing bothered them.” She tried emulating that sense of detachment. “Going on a date tonight with $11 in my bank account let’s hope he’s not a feminist lol,” reads an oft-recirculated tweet of hers from 2018. (She later posted an update: Her date confessed that he followed her on Twitter and was happy to cover the bill.) “What the haters and also my mom don’t seem to understand is that when I post a photo of my bare tits there are at least 3 layers of irony,” reads another from 2019.
“If I talk about the things that I’m feeling or experiencing like I don’t care, or like I kinda like that they’re happening to me — ‘I like being sad!’ — then I’ll feel good,” she remembers telling herself. The dopamine hits didn’t last, of course, and Sennott eventually evolved past that way of thinking, but by that point her online persona had become a means to achieve her artistic goals. “I felt like I was changing,” she says, “but I still kinda wanted to keep up that other version of myself.”
The engagement was hard to give up, even when it created moments of extreme discomfort for her. At those meetings in L.A., execs would open with canned lines like “So, you’re really slutty on Twitter!”
“And I’m like, ‘Um, yeah!’” she says, nodding vigorously but with panic behind her smile. “Not really knowing what I was supposed to do.”
Instead of running away from that image, Sennott began to hone it. The characters she played in “Shiva Baby” and “Bottoms” weren’t autobiographical, but their high-octane emotions about their crushes and hookups, mostly involving other women, put Sennott at the center of sexual conversations more nuanced than social media allows.
On the internet, however, Sennott didn’t have a character to hide behind, and she was still having complicated experiences there. Until someone shook her out of it. “Ayo inspired me,” she says. She and Edebiri had rolled around the idea of deleting their Twitter accounts for years, but Sennott wasn’t taking it seriously. “Then she texted me at 11:30 p.m. on a Wednesday or something, like, ‘I just deleted my Twitter, lmao. Feels great. Feels awesome.’ I was like, ‘Wait a second. What? We have to talk about this. What should I do?’ I was freaking out.”
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But she followed suit, and she’s better for it. “I felt great being away from that,” she says. “Then, of course, sometimes I miss it. I’m like, ‘I have to tell you guys something!’ I have things I want to say, but not feel like I’m still performing that old version of myself.”
Instead, with “I Love L.A.,” she’s exploring a new version of her old self.
Sennott leads the cast of “I Love L.A.” as Maia, a junior staffer at a talent management company who starts to involve herself in the career of her estranged college friend Tallulah (Odessa A’Zion) — now a budding social media star — after she shows up at Maia’s home with no warning. The two were co-dependent besties in New York and planned to live together in L.A. after graduation, until Tallulah backed out at the last minute, ditching Maia to stay back East and kicking off a period of mutual resentment.
Sennott mined the tension she felt around her own move to L.A. to explore Maia’s feelings of abandonment. “You feel a sense of pride when you find your people in your 20s,” she says. “Then people who live in the same place as you start moving somewhere else. I felt like, ‘Guys! Can we all just pick a place and lock down and stay here and nobody leaves?’” Sennott now understands that “everyone’s gonna do their own thing, but those feelings of uncertainty are where the characters start in the show.”
With Tallulah, Sennott wanted to create a character that felt especially “of this generation.” “I saw some statistic that, like, 89% of kindergartners want to be a TikTok influencer,” she says, laughing. Though she’s speaking in hyperbole, the truth isn’t as far off as you’d think; she’s referencing a 2023 survey that reported 57% of Gen Z wants to make their money posting on social media.
Tallulah’s career was also a vehicle to dissect what makes young people gravitate to — and hate — each other. “I have had so many weird parasocial relationships with people where I’ve thought to myself that I know them, but it’s this version of them.”
Having been influencer-adjacent for so many years, Sennott hasn’t yet seen a scripted depiction of life on the internet that feels real to her. It often comes off “clunky,” she says.
So in her own show, she tried to create “an internet that was living and breathing and moving, but not making any direct references,” she says. “I Love L.A.” will premiere on Nov. 2, barely more than a year after it was greenlit. But Sennott wanted to avoid anything that could become outdated, “because the way the internet moves, you’ll never be able to keep up if you [try to capture] a moment in time.”
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The rest of the show’s cast samples from a wide swath of the L.A. experience. To play Alani — another college friend, whose father is a major movie producer — she hired True Whitaker, daughter of Forest Whitaker. “I wasn’t set on casting a nepo baby, but I thought it could be fun and meta,” Sennott says. It helped that in Whitaker’s callback, the actor said, “Guys, I slept with my dad’s Emmy under my pillow last night for good luck.” (A’zion, too, is a child of the industry. Her mother is actor-producer Pamela Adlon.)
By contrast, Maia’s boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), a grade-school Spanish teacher, is the only person in her life unattached to the entertainment industry. Much of Gen Z grew up watching Hutcherson in “Bridge to Terabithia” and “The Hunger Games,” which Sennott thinks bolsters his role in the show: “You’re like, ‘Oh, I know him. He’s been my boyfriend for years!’” Beyond bringing Maia down to earth, Sennott sees Dylan as a way to demonstrate her own growth beyond her show’s image-obsessed characters. Trying not to laugh, she says, “I know this isn’t the only thing that matters.”
To that end, Sennott grounded herself by turning to her community. Her friend Jordan Firstman rounds out the main cast as Charlie, a celebrity stylist, and other compatriots will appear in cameos throughout the season.
“Me and my friends are like, ‘I guess we have to work together if we want to hang out,’” Sennott says. Though she’s accepted that “the push and pull is kind of forever” between New York and L.A., drawing from her friend group the way she and Seligman did on “Shiva Baby” and “Bottoms” is a way to feel closer to her first home.
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Sennott’s profile continues to rise behind the camera. She co-created Dan Levy’s upcoming Netflix comedy series “Big Mistakes” and co-wrote the pilot with him. And for an upcoming biopic of Heidi Fleiss, Sennott co-wrote the script with director Leah Rachel and Travis Jackson. She was originally set to star as Fleiss, she says, but the role went to Aubrey Plaza due to Sennott’s schedule on “I Love L.A.”
Even as she recognizes that Los Angeles has wound up providing her biggest opportunities yet, Sennott is careful not to romanticize her new digs. “I was sort of obsessed with how miserable I was in my early 20s, and as I was writing about it, it was like, ‘Don’t worry, you’re miserable now too, in a different way!’” she says. She’s laughing, but it’s only funny because it’s true. It’s hard, sometimes painful work to be No. 1 both on screen and behind the scenes.
“You’re there prepping before anyone else gets there, and then everyone comes with all this fresh energy, but you’re already tired,” she says. “Then you do the shoot and it’s so fun — then everyone leaves, and you’re in a dark room, alone, dealing with your own decisions.”
That feeling has hit Sennott most acutely while working on the season finale — her directorial debut. “I was in the edit, looking at my own episode, being like, ‘Who the fuck directed this shit? Where’s all the coverage? No one got that line? I’m so pissed at myself,’” she says. “And you’re always blaming a different version of yourself. I’d be watching a scene with me in it, like, ‘This actress is just not delivering today.’”
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Sennott is getting adjusted to the whiplash that comes with all these different hats. “Some days you’re an actress and you’re like, ‘This is just fabulous. I’ve got seltzer and Diet Coke in my trailer,’” she says, swaying her shoulders with glee. “Then you’re like, ‘Nobody respects me there. Everyone thinks I’m just a puppet. I need to be a writer.’ Then you go be a writer, and you lock yourself away, and it feels great. Then all of a sudden, you’re like, ‘I have a headache. I have no ideas. I’ve been wearing sweatpants for three months. Let me out.’”
From coast to coast and script to script, there’s been a common theme throughout Sennott’s coming of age. “I was longing for one thing that wasn’t gonna change. For so long, I was clinging to ‘Everyone stay here with me! I’m afraid to be alone.’”
With “I Love L.A.,” she’s learning to let that feeling go — it’s a relic from a past life, like the storage unit full of furniture from her parents’ house and NYU dorm that she finally gave up. ”I’m finishing my Saturn return or whatever,” Sennott says. Though she gives herself a slight eyeroll, she’s taking that astrological event seriously.
“I keep getting hit over the head, struggling with control and wanting to know everything, but even when I get the outcome I planned, it doesn’t feel how I wanted it to,” she says. “So I’m trying to be open to life and see what happens. And I’m really loving being here right now. I feel like an L.A. girly.”
