Rachel Sennott plays women who want something and do not pretend otherwise, and she is funniest when she has written the scene they walk into. Loud, sharp and easy to like, she is still looking for a story as good as her jokes.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Rachel Sennott listen. In I Love LA (2025) Maia hears a friend out with the face of someone doing arithmetic, working out before the sentence ends whether the sympathy she is about to offer might also be useful. In Bottoms (2023) PJ marches into every room with a plan and the confidence of someone twice as attractive and half as clever. The women she plays want things, out loud, and she never softens the wanting to make them nicer. That is the joke, and it is a good one.
She came to it through stand-up at open mics and sketches posted online, and the timing shows. Shiva Baby (2020), Emma Seligman's first feature, shut her in a house full of relatives and made comedy out of pure discomfort; Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) put her in an ensemble and let her be the loud one. Bottoms, which she wrote with Seligman, is the turn: broad, bloody and properly funny, with Ayo Edebiri as the anxious half of a real double act. Since then she has done what comic actors are always told to do and written her own parts. I Love LA, which she created, wrote, directed and starred in, is her first series, and Big Mistakes (2026), which she co-created, followed. In between she led I Used to Be Funny (2023), a tragicomic drama we have not reviewed.
What works is company. Sennott is at her best when there is someone quieter beside her to make the noise mean something: Edebiri in Bottoms, whose half-swallowed apologies are the reason the film works, and Odessa A'zion in I Love LA, with whom the series stops being a satire and becomes a friendship. We laughed hardest, and then felt a little ashamed, at a scene in I Love LA where Maia says something supportive to a friend and decides halfway through the sentence that it is also an opportunity; we had been doing the same sums. Behind the camera it is Lorene Scafaria, directing alongside her, who holds on a face after the joke, and those are the episodes we remember.
What does not work, yet, is structure. Bottoms has a premise, a set of running jokes and a finale, and gets between them by having people simply decide things. I Love LA is exhausting for two episodes before it settles, and its satire of influencer life is thin. In someone else's film she can be too much: in Katarina Zhu's Bunnylovr (2026) she plays the friend Bella at a pitch the rest of the picture does not share, so that every time she arrives it becomes a louder, broader film for two minutes and then turns back.
She has said she is guided by her gut, that she knows a script is right when she finds herself saying the words aloud. The gut is sound on the line and less sure on the shape. The one to wait for is the film where the middle is built as carefully as the jokes, and given how much of her own material she has already written, we would not bet against it.
Biography
Rachel Sennott is an American actress, comedian and screenwriter. She trained at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, and began performing stand-up on the New York open mic circuit.
Sennott is known for her roles in Shiva Baby (2020) as Danielle, Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) as Alice, Bottoms (2023) as PJ (which she also co-wrote), and Saturday Night (2024) as Rosie Shuster. She created, wrote and stars as Maia Simsbury in the HBO series I Love LA (2025). She co-wrote Bottoms with Emma Seligman and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the screenplay.
