I Love LA is Rachel Sennott‘s most personal work yet, in that it’s inspired by her own lived experiences of moving from New York City to Los Angeles and the major lifestyle shifts that followed. Sennott tells TV Insider that when you see Maia and Tallulah (Odessa A’zion) together, you’re seeing two different versions of herself, but of course, very “exaggerated, heightened” ones. In fact, there’s a little piece of Sennott in every character, the star says.
Sennott is the creator, executive producer, and star of the HBO comedy, the finale of which marks her directorial debut. While it’s a deeply personal project, the Bottoms alum says none of the characters is “a clear one-to-one” comparison to herself. “I put pieces of myself in all the characters,” she says, but there are also bits and pieces of the writers and actors baked into the characters as well.
I Love LA stars Sennott, A’zion, Jordan Firstman, True Whitaker, and Josh Hutcherson as a group of friends trying to “make it” in LA, but they all have very different definitions of success.
“I sort of split myself between Maia and Tallulah,” Sennott explains. “Tallulah is a little bit like who I was when I first moved to New York, and I was a little bit of a messy party girl, blown up a bunch of times, and adding all these other inspirations. Maia is like me when I first moved to LA and was depressed and isolated, and a little controlling. I am not either of those characters … but I hope people see themselves in the characters, good or bad.”
The Maia-Tallulah friendship is going to stay complicated throughout the eight-episode season. They’re in a constant state of wondering why they’re still friends and if their bond is strong enough to last, and then being reminded of why they’re each other’s soulmates. They both want a big life, and they know that their friendship is their key to creating it.
“I think they balance each other out and they need each other,” Sennott says. A’zion agrees, saying that they have a very “sisterly relationship,” a.k.a. one they’ll never really be able to shake.
I Love LA also features one of the more realistic depictions of internet culture on TV. Much of the cast was already social-media famous before the show, which may blur the lines between themselves and their characters even more. For Hutcherson and Leighton Meester, who have long avoided social media, I Love LA opened their eyes to new sides of it.
“Internet culture is wild,” Hutcherson says. “Some of the greatest, funniest, creative stuff that I’ve seen comes from it … but at the same time, it’s scary because people can throw out the meanest, darkest stuff. And they’re hiding behind a screen and [saying] things you would never say to somebody to their face. It’s a dangerous cesspool in so many ways. I stay away from it a lot.”
“The way this show portrays it is, it’s used as a tool in so many ways of success, of notoriety, of attaining one’s goals,” Hutcherson goes on, “but it has the dark side to it. So I don’t know. It’s a very powerful tool that is used for both good and evil, and it just exists, and we have to learn to deal with it and use it properly. I’m still on that journey if you can’t tell.”
Gossip Girl was one of the first TV shows about social media, and now Meester, Gossip Girl‘s Blair Waldorf, is part of this new generation of social media storytelling on TV. She says it’s interesting to see how Hollywood and the internet have blended and how I Love LA brings that reality to life.
“There are people whose entire career is based on their social media page and profile and their online persona,” Meester says. The fact that there are “literal agencies for it and management companies and a whole world that is about supporting that kind of infrastructure” was fascinating for her to see and portray through her character, Alyssa.
Learn more about the cast’s thoughts on the show’s relationship with social media in the full video interview above.
I Love LA, Sundays, 10:30/9:30c, HBO