On today’s episode, Variety reporter Selome Hailu details her cover story on Rachel Sennott, the multihyphenate behind HBO’s new comedy “I Love L.A.” Marc Malkin has a Red Carpet Rundown with Sarah Michelle Gellar dishing about Hulu’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reboot. And reporter Giana Levy explains what superfans see Netflix’s “Love Is Blind.”
Hailu has been intrigued by Sennott’s work since the latter was fresh out of NYU and gaining attention for the 2020 micro-budget feature “Shiva Baby” that found its way to Netflix. Sennott is emblematic of her generation of auteur creatives who built their first followings via content shared on social media platforms.
“She’s very intentional about her image,” Hailu says. “She had this experience of constantly going viral online and building a platform on social media, especially on Twitter, that preceded her career. And that was what she leveraged to get meetings with executives and to get standup gigs and to really establish herself before she had real inroads to the industry.”
Sennott quickly proved a master of marketing herself. Perhaps even too well.
“A way to do that online, and to get that attention, is by playing with your sexuality. And so we talked about this push and pull she felt of having fun with that and being true to herself with that, but then also feeling that people were projecting onto her or thinking that they knew her more deeply than they did,” Hailu observes. “Eventually she got off social media and that really helped soothe those feelings. For the last several years, she’s been putting all of those thoughts that are conflicting and exciting about the sexuality of a young woman into the work. You see it in ‘Shiva Baby.’ You see it in [2023 film] ‘Bottoms’ and you really see it in ‘I Love L.A.’ ”
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