Rachel Sennott takes emmy’s video call on a lunchtime stroll around the Warner Bros. lot, the camera jostling in time to her steps. She’s chatty, but she gets antsy on the phone: “I can’t talk and not walk.” She’s in Warner Village, she explains, a leafy stretch of offices (sometimes used as locations) that look like the Connecticut suburbs where she grew up. The sky overhead is clear, the sun is shining, and Sennott is wearing a white spaghetti-strap tank, wired headphones and a bedazzled baseball cap that spells out “NEW YORK.”
This week, she is in the writers’ room for season two of her HBO comedy I Love LA, which follows a group of very online twentysomethings trying to make it in Los Angeles as influencers and image-makers. “We’re working on episode three,” she says. “You change one thing here, and then you have to pull every little thread through. We’re not rebreaking three, but we’re rebreaking it a little bit.”
After eye-catching roles in movies like Shiva Baby and Bodies Bodies Bodies, Sennott made her debut as a showrunner with I Love LA. She also stars as junior talent agent Maia Simsbury — whose ambition often lands her in chaotic situations — and she directed the final episode of season one.
If you’ve been following Sennott’s career, this multihyphenate lifestyle makes complete sense. In college at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, she and her friends — among them actress Ayo Edebiri and director Emma Seligman, who are also writer-producers on their own projects and her professional collaborators — spent their time doing open mics, filming sketches and acting in each other’s projects.
I Love LA feels like a quintessential Rachel Sennott comedy in the sense that it’s a smart sendup of zillennial culture that often dials itself up to 11. Sennott herself has a particular talent for going big. The second episode of season one has Maia brandishing a knife at her schoolteacher boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson, Future Man), and screaming, “Should I kill myself on Instagram live or TikTok live?!” (Maia isn’t actually threatening self-harm: It’s a ruse to get an unhinged influencer out of her apartment by “out-crazying the crazy.”)
Underneath the antics, however, Sennott and her fellow writers are trying to capture the experience of coming of age during a period of internet exhaustion, political turmoil, ecological ruin and cultural fracture. “I graduated college, and then it was Covid. I moved to L.A., and there were the strikes and fires,” Sennott says. “It’s been disaster after disaster.” Many of her peers feel hopeless and disillusioned, certain that they’ll never feel much security, unsure about whether there’s much point in having kids. Emma Barrie, Sennott’s coshowrunner, says that while they were shooting the pilot, executive producer and director Lorene Scafaria (Succession) brought up the idea of modern life as a dance marathon, in the vein of Sydney Pollack’s 1969 Depression-era drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? “It’s almost like, the world’s ending, so let’s party till we die,” Barrie says. “You can never afford a house, so you might as well buy that Erewhon smoothie.”
Each of the central characters on I Love LA has a different response to the horror show before them. “Maia feels like the last person on the Titanic, on her hamster wheel, trying to hustle as the ship is sinking,” Sennott explains. Tallulah (Odessa A’zion, Marty Supreme), her influencer BFF and sole client, leans into nihilism and hedonism, stealing designer clothes and defacing her own billboards. Their stylist friend Charlie (Jordan Firstman, English Teacher) is nakedly careerist — he’s the guy scanning the room over your shoulder at a party — but beneath his hard exterior, he’s searching for meaning and connection. (A short-lived gig styling a TikTok star brings Charlie into unlikely communion with a group of ultra-supportive Christian bros.) Alani (True Whitaker, Godfather of Harlem) is the daughter of a famous filmmaker, and she greets objectively disturbing events with a blithe, woo-woo sweetness.
The clever trick of I Love LA is that this sense of generational dread and defeat simmers just below the surface, informing the characters’ decisions without making you feel like you’re watching an afterschool special. For the most part, Maia and her friends aren’t discussing the climate crisis; they’re absorbed by trying to wrangle brand deals, invitations to important fashion dinners and collaborations with popular TikTokers. But the show is at no risk of feeling like thin influencer satire, either — their anxieties are way too real for that.
A quick glance at Sennott’s résumé reveals a web of friendships and close collaborations. She starred with Molly Gordon in Seligman’s debut feature, Shiva Baby, then cowrote the queer-fight-club comedy Bottoms with Seligman; Edebiri, who headlined that movie with Sennott, appears in I Love LA as a somewhat alien pop star. (Gordon and Edebiri, meanwhile, are on The Bear together.) While describing the process of making her first show, Sennott is forthright about leaning on, and learning from, her more seasoned colleagues.
When I Love LA was in its earliest stages, HBO did some matchmaking, pairing Sennott with Barrie, who had written on Barry and Common Side Effects. “She has a lot more experience than I do in writers’ rooms, and at the time, she was going to help me with the pilot,” Sennott recalls. Barrie had never been an advisor in this capacity before, and neither woman was certain the arrangement would work out. “A person in her position could be so guarded and put off by the idea that the network wants to set her up with someone to help her. That attitude was not there. We totally hit it off,” Barrie says, adding that Sennott is remarkably open to other people’s ideas. As Sennott puts it: “Cut to two years later, we’re on set at two in the morning and know everything about each other’s lives.”
Sennott says that when problems inevitably arise with a storyline she’s writing, she often wants to abandon it and chase after other ideas that seem, on the surface, easier to execute. (“If you continue with that idea, you’d run into problems, too,” she notes.) Barrie, Sennott says, is a grounding force who pushes her to stick with the plot point at hand. Barrie attributes this outlook to working in other writers’ rooms: Having heard from showrunners that the second episode is the hardest to craft, for instance, she was prepared to rewrite it several times. “With the pilot, you’re setting everything up, but with the second episode you’re saying: ‘Here’s what a standard episode of the show is,’” Barrie explains.
Whereas Barrie is an introvert who likes to think through ideas alone, Sennott brings a sense of fun and energy to the writers’ room. In fact, she has a lot of energy, period. “From the moment I met her, Rachel was a crazy hard worker,” Barrie says. “I was expecting to have to email her and be like, ‘Where’s that draft?’ But I would give her notes, and the next morning I’d wake up to a draft. She made me work faster.”
For both women, it was their first time showrunning. Barrie had the benefit of seeking advice from her boss on Common Side Effects, Steve Hely, whose calm presence and curiosity she sought to channel in her managerial role. Nonetheless, she and Sennott experienced their share of showrunner growing pains together — learning, for instance, that driving scenes are hard and that nighttime driving scenes are even harder. (“We shot this great moment of Alani driving, shouting at another driver and cutting someone off, and we had to cut it. I was like, man, there goes a whole day,” Barrie says.)
Sennott feels that she personally became more adaptable in the course of writing and shooting season one. When it came time to direct her first episode — the season finale, set in New York — she found herself up against a heatwave, a lightning storm and a whirlwind two-day shoot. “It’s like childbirth or something,” Sennott says. “You black out and are like, ‘I want to do that again.’”
Ahead of shooting the finale, Sennott consulted with Scafaria, who advised her to figure out which shots she cared about most, so that she could fight for those, and to know what she was trying to do with the camera at any given moment. “Cool shots don’t matter if there’s no reason for it. Who is the [camera] in relation to the actors? She was telling me about how, on one of her episodes for Succession, the camera was standing in for [one of the characters],” Sennott says.
From her fellow writer and executive producer Max Silvestri (Killing It), Sennott got a master class in story structure and justifying each plot point. “I personally think I’m good at dialogue and character, and I’m learning to be better at structure,” she says.
In April, another Sennott collaboration debuted on Netflix: Big Mistakes, which she cocreated with Dan Levy (Schitt’s Creek). The original idea for the series, which follows two quarrelsome siblings — Levy as a type-A priest and Taylor Ortega (Ghosts) as a loose-cannon teacher — as they accidentally become embroiled in an organized crime ring, was “completely Dan’s,” Sennott says. She loved the concept, though: “I’m half Sicilian, and I’m always desperately searching for crime roots in my family. I’m always like, ‘Did Pop-Pop say anything …?’ My mom is like, ‘Sorry, love, we weren’t in the mob.’” In short order, Sennott and Levy banged out the outline and wrote the pilot.
Sennott wasn’t in the writers’ room for Big Mistakes — it conflicted with I Love LA — but she admires the tone that Levy and his team were able to strike. “It’s such a tricky balance, because you want it to be funny, but it’s got to be scary, too. He walked that line perfectly,” she says. As an executive producer on that series, Sennott weighed in on matters like staffing and casting decisions. A Facebook group for residents of the Connecticut suburb where she grew up also found its way into the show: “The tea that goes down in that Facebook group is insane. During Covid, me and my siblings became obsessed with it. Drama started off of nothing.”
Big Mistakes and I Love LA are set in radically different worlds, despite their shared comedic sensibility of things rapidly spiraling out of control. Because the two shows hit at the same time for Sennott, each acted as something of a palate cleanser for the other, offering an opportunity to reset and dive back in fresh. (She also wrote and starred in The Scene, a vertical microdrama for Marc Jacobs’ pre–Fall 2026 campaign, which follows Sennott in a frenetic dash through Manhattan.)
The informal remote tour of the Warner lot ends back at the I Love LA office, with its drop-tile ceiling and large pink mood board. Sennott goes to the kitchen to microwave her lunch — steak and potatoes from the meal service Kooshi — and puts her phone down on the counter. Then, just like her character, Maia, she hops on her office treadmill to finish the call. Like she says: She gets antsy on the phone.
Heading into the second season of I Love LA, Sennott felt that some space had opened up between her personal experience and the characters on the show. “Season one, I was gripping onto needing to have this scene be exactly like a fight in a grocery store that I had with my ex-boyfriend. And it’s like, ‘It doesn’t make sense, it’s not that funny and no one was there but you,’” she says. Sennott has learned to release herself from the particulars of her own life and focus instead on capturing the emotion of that grocery-store fight, reimagined with details that will move the story forward in a more interesting way.
Barrie found that once they had cast the show, its characters took on new complexity. True Whitaker — whose father is Forest Whitaker (Godfather of Harlem) — transformed Alani, the group nepo baby. “Honestly, we didn’t give that character enough to do before we cast her,” Barrie recalls. “True auditioned over Zoom, and before she started reading, she talked about the mood board that she’d made, and how she slept with her dad’s Emmy in bed that night, because she really wanted the role. And she talked about astrology and angel numbers. She was so charming, funny and sweet.” Suddenly, they understood that this was a character for whom you only wish the best. In season two, Barrie says, the writers have been pushing even further into the friends’ nuances and finding different ways for them to react to the chaos of their world.
Over the course of the first season, Sennott’s colleagues discovered the full extent of her talent for comedy at the extremes. In episode six, Maia gets wasted at her boyfriend’s wholesome game night and turns into an absolute demon, threatening his pretty coworker and pulling him into the bathroom for a quickie. “We were like, ‘Oh, we can push her so far,’” Barrie says. “We want to see this version of her more.”
I Love LA is executive-produced by creator Rachel Sennott along with Emma Barrie, Aida Rodgers, Max Silvestri and Lorene Scafaria. The series is a production of HBO.
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #7, 2026, under the title "Acting Her Age."
