How Rachel Sennott Learned to ‘Love L.A.,’ Pushed Past Hollywood Execs Thinking She’s Just ‘Slutty on Twitter’ and Created HBO’s Next Big Comedy
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
“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!”
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 HBOcomedy 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.
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.
