Rachel Sennott hops on to our Zoom call and immediately launches into an apology. “Oh my God – I’m sorry!” she says, sounding pained. She is only a couple of minutes late, but she is keen to explain. “I have such a problem, because I’m a yapper on the phone. I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Luckily, it’s exactly what a writer wants to hear at the start of an interview. Besides, it’s fairly unsurprising. Anyone who has watched the unapologetically queer, unapologetically crass film Bottoms – which Sennott co-wrote with Emma Seligman, and starred in alongside her friend, The Bear’s breakout star Ayo Edebiri – will already know that she has plenty to say, be it about gender, sex, or the merits of starting a high-school fight club. And by the end of her new eight-part HBO series I Love LA, it is clear that she has even more to say about the darker side of Gen Z life (at 30, she is an honorary member of the gang, a tale-end millennial with a knack for straddling both generations).
The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls are inevitable and Sennott is, of course, a fan, citing the show alongside Sex and the City, Insecure and Atlanta as influences for her series, which follows the travails of an influencer, Tallulah (Odessa A’Zion) and her friend and fledgling talent manager, Maia (Sennott). Perhaps the largest spot on the moodboard, though, went to Entourage, the HBO sitcom about a rising A-list actor making his way in an often-seedy Hollywood (choice quote: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). Sennott started watching it during the pandemic, became “obsessed”, and decided to put her own twist on it “for the girls and the gays”.
