Rachel Sennott was 24 years old when a micro-budget film about a Jewish shiva turned her into one of indie cinema’s most talked-about new faces. She was 30 when HBO renewed her own series for a second season while the first season was still actively airing. That kind of trajectory does not happen by accident.
Rachel Anne Sennott (pronounced SE-nit) is a 30-year-old actress, comedian, and screenwriter from Simsbury, Connecticut. She is best known for her breakout role in Shiva Baby (2020), for co-writing and starring in Bottoms (2023), and for creating, writing, and leading the HBO comedy series I Love LA (2025), which earned an 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a second-season renewal before its first season even wrapped.
She is not just an actress who got lucky with a good part. Sennott writes her own material, steers her own projects, and has built a specific comedic identity around anxiety, awkwardness, and the particular discomfort of being a young woman trying to figure out her life in real time. Her Instagram handle, @treaclychild, has 1.3 million followers, and her cultural footprint stretches from A24 films to Charli XCX music videos to the 2025 Oscars nominations announcement stage.
Growing Up in Simsbury
Simsbury, Connecticut is a quiet suburban town — exactly the kind of place that produces people desperate to leave it and make noise somewhere louder. Rachel Anne Sennott was born there on September 19, 1995, the daughter of Donna and Jack Sennott. She is of Italian and Irish descent and was raised Catholic. She has four siblings: Katherine, Anna, Brian, and Lizzie. None of them appear to be in the public eye, though they surface occasionally on Rachel’s Instagram.
She graduated from Simsbury High School in 2014 and headed straight to New York. Comedy was not yet on the agenda.
At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Sennott was training as an actor, studying alongside the methods taught at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. She graduated with a BFA in 2017. The pivot to stand-up came from an unexpected direction: a college boyfriend who dragged her to open mic nights. As she later told Forbes, she had no idea what stand-up was when she first went. She was not afraid of it because she did not know enough to be afraid. She kept going because it was fun. That accidental entry into comedy turned out to be the defining move of her career.
Shiva Baby and the Indie Breakthrough
By 2016, Sennott was performing regularly on the New York City alt-comedy circuit, including on the show It’s a Guy Thing. She developed a comedic voice rooted in anxiety and speed — humor that worked because it felt too specific and too honest to be manufactured.
The first major signal came in 2018, when director Emma Seligman cast Sennott in a short film called Shiva Baby. When Seligman expanded it into a feature, Sennott came with it. The film premiered in 2020 and immediately got attention for its suffocating tension and Sennott’s performance as Danielle, a college student trying to survive a family shiva while her ex-boyfriend, his wife, and her sugar daddy all occupy the same room.
Critics called it one of the best films of 2020. Sennott received a Gotham Award nomination for Breakthrough Actor. For a low-budget indie with no major studio behind it, that kind of recognition was significant.
What Shiva Baby established was not just that Sennott could act. It established that she could carry a film’s entire emotional and comedic register on her own performance.
From A24 to Bottoms: Building a Filmography Fast
The three years after Shiva Baby were relentless. Sennott moved quickly from indie darling to mainstream comedy fixture.
2022 brought Bodies Bodies Bodies, an A24 horror-comedy directed by Halina Reijn. The film starred Pete Davidson, Amandla Stenberg, and a cast of young Hollywood names. Sennott played Alice, and critics consistently named her the film’s standout. The New York Times Style Magazine singled her out specifically. A24 films have a way of making careers, and Bodies Bodies Bodies did exactly that for Sennott — it put her in front of an audience that had never seen Shiva Baby.
Then came Bottoms (2023), which is probably the most important project of her pre-HBO career. She did not just star in it. She co-wrote it with director Emma Seligman, their second collaboration. The film is a queer teen sex comedy that leans hard into satire, absurdism, and the particular chaos of high school social hierarchies. She and Seligman received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. Charli XCX composed the film’s score — a connection that would deepen significantly in the years that followed.
Bottoms confirmed something about Sennott that Shiva Baby had suggested: she is not just performing other people’s material. She has a writer’s brain and a specific point of view.
2024 added more range. She played real-life SNL writer and comedian Rosie Shuster in Jason Reitman’s biographical film Saturday Night, which dramatized the chaotic first night of Saturday Night Live in 1975. Playing a real, named historical figure in a prestige film is a different kind of challenge than indie comedy. She handled it.
That same summer, she appeared in Charli XCX’s “360” music video alongside Chloë Sevigny, Julia Fox, and Emma Chamberlain — one of the most culturally discussed music videos of 2024. It was peak internet-girl moment, and Sennott was at the center of it.
| Year | Project | Role | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Shiva Baby | Danielle | Gotham Award nomination |
| 2022 | Bodies Bodies Bodies (A24) | Alice | Critics’ standout performance |
| 2023 | Bottoms | PJ (co-writer) | Independent Spirit nomination |
| 2024 | Saturday Night | Rosie Shuster | Real historical figure |
| 2024 | Charli XCX “360” | Herself | Viral cultural moment |
| 2025 | I Love LA (HBO) | Maia (creator/writer/EP) | 87% RT, renewed S2 |
I Love LA: Running Her Own Show
Creating and running a television series is a different level of creative responsibility than acting in one. Sennott made the jump at 29.
I Love LA premiered on HBO on November 2, 2025, at 10:30pm, following the IT: Welcome to Derry slot on Sunday nights. The eight-episode first season wrapped December 21. Sennott serves as creator, writer, executive producer, lead actress, and made her directing debut on the series — all at once.
The show follows Maia (Sennott), an up-and-coming talent manager who takes on her chaotic influencer best friend Tallulah (Odessa A’zion) as a client, while her wider friend group navigates ambition, identity, and what it actually means to grow up when LA keeps rewarding you for staying the same. Josh Hutcherson and Jordan Firstman co-star.
The critical reception was genuinely split in an interesting way. Rotten Tomatoes landed at 87% from critics, with the consensus describing it as “an irreverent and self-referential comedy speaking to Gen Z existentialism.” Metacritic gave it a 64, indicating generally favorable reviews. The Hollywood Reporter called it “an eventually intriguing portrait of late-20s anxiety.” Roger Ebert’s site used the word “uproarious.” The pushback mostly came from viewers who found the characters too self-absorbed — which, as many defenders pointed out, is entirely the point.
HBO renewed it for Season 2 on November 20, 2025, while only three of the eight episodes had aired. That is not a normal renewal timeline. It reflects strong early viewership numbers: the show was tracking as HBO’s second top freshman comedy in platform history, averaging nearly 2 million L+3 U.S. viewers.
What makes I Love LA notable beyond the numbers is what it says about Sennott’s creative ambitions. She is not playing a version of herself in someone else’s show. She built the show, wrote the characters, and is directing episodes. At 30, she has a deal with HBO, a series in production, and a second season already greenlit. That is the definition of a showrunner career beginning.
Personal Life and Relationships
Sennott keeps her personal life quieter than her professional one, which takes some effort when you are regularly photographed at events like the Met Gala.
She was in a relationship with actor Logan Miller from approximately 2020 to 2024. They posted about each other on Instagram early in the relationship, during COVID lockdowns, but largely kept things private from that point. During the Saturday Night press tour in 2024, she referenced watching a film with her ex’s family — widely taken as a signal the relationship had ended.
By June 2025, she was being photographed with music producer Blake Slatkin at Sushi Park in West Hollywood. The photos showed them kissing on their way out. Three months later, fan accounts captured the two attending Charli XCX and George Daniel’s wedding in Italy together in September 2025 — which also happened to bring together multiple threads of Sennott’s world, given that Slatkin co-produced Charli’s “360,” the video Sennott starred in.
Slatkin, born October 16, 1997, is one of pop music’s most in-demand producers. He started his career as a teenager with an internship under Benny Blanco, later enrolled at NYU (overlapping years apart from Sennott), then dropped out to pursue music full-time in LA. His production credits include “Stay” by Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI, “About Damn Time” by Lizzo, and “Unholy” by Sam Smith. He won a Grammy for Record of the Year and appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2022.
Neither has publicly confirmed the relationship. Given the pattern of joint sightings, it is safe to say they are not strangers.
Sennott is not married and has no children. She lives in Los Angeles.
The Charli XCX Connection (and What It Says About Her Orbit)
The relationship between Sennott and Charli XCX is worth its own section because it illustrates exactly the kind of cultural space Sennott occupies.
Charli XCX interviewed Sennott for her BBC Radio 1 podcast back in 2022, before either of them had reached their current cultural peak. Charli then composed the score for Bottoms in 2023. Then came the “360” video in 2024, with Sennott in the center of a cast of internet-famous women playing out a satirical ritual of choosing “the next hot girl.” Then both appeared in a Poppi Super Bowl ad in February 2026.
Then Sennott attended Charli’s wedding to George Daniel (of The 1975) in Italy in September 2025 — and reportedly with Blake Slatkin, who had himself produced “360.”
This is not a casual celebrity friendship. It is a creative and social web that connects indie film, Gen Z comedy, pop music, and the specific internet-girl cultural moment of the mid-2020s. Sennott sits at an intersection that very few people in Hollywood actually occupy.
Net Worth and Career Earnings
Sennott’s estimated net worth sits somewhere between $1 million and $2 million as of 2026. The range exists because, for actors at her level, most income is not publicly disclosed. The low end of earlier estimates ($300,000-$500,000) likely predate her HBO deal and are no longer accurate.
Her income streams are genuinely diverse for someone still in the early phase of their career:
- Film acting fees across multiple studio and A24 releases
- Writing credits on Bottoms (co-writer) and I Love LA (sole creator/writer)
- Producing and executive producing fees on I Love LA and other projects
- Her HBO overall deal, which covers series development and production
- Brand work including the Poppi Super Bowl campaign (2026)
- Directing fees from her I Love LA episodes
The honest framing is that Sennott is not yet at the income level of a major network star, but she is building the kind of creative infrastructure — an HBO series, a writing career, an EP credit — that compounds quickly. A second season of I Love LA and continued film work will push that number significantly higher.
What Makes Her Different
The question worth asking about anyone in Sennott’s position is: why her, specifically?
There are other young comedy actresses working right now. There are other NYU graduates in the industry. There is no shortage of people doing anxiety-based humor on film and television. What separates Sennott is the combination of writing ability, genuine indie credibility, and an extremely specific point of view that does not soften for the room.
Her comedy works because it is rooted in something recognizable and slightly uncomfortable. Her characters — Danielle, Alice, PJ, Maia — are not likable in the conventional sense. They are self-involved, panicked, occasionally selfish, and very funny. That is a harder needle to thread than writing a character the audience simply roots for.
The Reddit response to I Love LA is instructive here. Viewers who hated it said the characters were too annoying. Viewers who loved it said exactly: that’s the point. Sennott is not making comfort television. She is making television that pokes at something real about how a certain generation navigates ambition and self-image.
She is also, notably, someone Ayo Edebiri calls a close collaborator — and Edebiri is not someone who attaches her name to projects casually. Their Comedy Central project Ayo and Rachel Are Single was one of the early signals that both of them were operating at a level above what their credits at the time suggested.
The comparison that keeps coming up from critics is not to any specific actress but to a type of creator: the writer-performer who builds something for themselves rather than waiting to be cast. Think Lena Dunham or Phoebe Waller-Bridge in structure, but sharper-edged and more chaotic than either. Sennott’s comedic sensibility is its own thing.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is Rachel Sennott?
Rachel Sennott is 30 years old. She was born on September 19, 1995, in Simsbury, Connecticut. She will turn 31 in September 2026.
What is Rachel Sennott known for?
She is best known for her breakout role in the indie film Shiva Baby (2020), for co-writing and starring in the queer teen comedy Bottoms (2023) alongside Ayo Edebiri, and for creating and starring in HBO’s I Love LA (2025), which was renewed for a second season while its first season was still airing.
Who is Rachel Sennott dating?
As of 2025-2026, Rachel Sennott has been linked to music producer Blake Slatkin. The two were photographed kissing at Sushi Park in Los Angeles in June 2025 and were spotted together at Charli XCX’s wedding in Italy in September 2025. Neither has publicly confirmed the relationship. She previously dated actor Logan Miller from around 2020 to 2024.
What is Rachel Sennott’s net worth?
Rachel Sennott’s net worth is estimated between $1 million and $2 million as of 2026. Her income comes from film acting, her writing credits on Bottoms and I Love LA, her executive producing work, her HBO showrunner deal, and brand partnerships including a 2026 Poppi Super Bowl campaign with Charli XCX.
Where is Rachel Sennott from?
She grew up in Simsbury, Connecticut, and graduated from Simsbury High School in 2014. She moved to New York City to attend NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she earned a BFA in 2017, and now lives in Los Angeles.
Did Rachel Sennott write Bottoms?
Yes. Bottoms (2023) was co-written by Sennott and director Emma Seligman. The script earned them a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. It was their second collaboration after Shiva Baby (2020).
Is I Love LA renewed for Season 2?
Yes. HBO renewed I Love LA for a second season on November 20, 2025, while only three of the eight first-season episodes had aired. The show was averaging nearly 2 million L+3 U.S. viewers and was tracking as HBO’s second top freshman comedy in platform history.