To paraphrase dear Hannah Horvath from “Girls,” Rachel Sennott may not be the voice of her generation, but she certainly is a voice of a generation.
And oh, what a voice. Smart, vulnerable, slightly neurotic, frequently ironic, always compelling. It’s a delicious style of comedy honed on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms, where the 27-year-old Sennott first developed a following with her wry observations on dating and personal finance. Then crystalized in starring roles in “Shiva Baby” (a masterclass in awkward humor) and the horror film “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (surprisingly amusing despite the gore). But with the one-two punch of “Bottoms” and “I Used to Be Funny,” both of which premiered at this year’s SXSW, Sennott has further demonstrated how rich and malleable her comic persona can be.
“I’m guided by my gut,” Sennott says of her process for choosing projects. “When I’m reading something and I’m saying the words out loud to myself, that’s the sign I’m excited. I’m already thinking about how I’m going to say a line or thinking ‘Oh, I can wear, like, a weird shoe if I play this role.”‘
In “Bottoms,” Sennott goes back to high school for a queer take on the classic sex comedy. She co-stars with “The Bear” breakout Ayo Edebiri as lesbian best friends who launch an all-female fight club. Sennott,who co-wrote the screenplay with her “Shiva Baby” collaborator Emma Seligman, said it was a chance to put a female spin on raunchy movies like “American Pie” and “Superbad.”
“It changes the way the characters fulfill their goal,” Sennott says of having women take the helm. “The characters in the movie use feminism to their advantage. But we didn’t just want to copy another movie that’s already great and just put girls in it. We wanted to update it and make it personal to ourselves.”
That meant encouraging improvisation on set, and tapping back into the intense feelings of adolescence that make high school such a minefield.
“When you’re in high school and you’re living in that world, it’s just kind of a microcosm,” says Sennott. “I remember how heightened everything was. It was just, like, ‘this is all that matters.’ Everything that’s important is the 3,000 people who live in this town. That’s it, and no one else exists. That’s how high the stakes feel.”
“Bottoms” is campy fun. In contrast, “I Used to Be Funny” is a much darker story, one that uses humor as shield against inner turmoil. Here, Sennott is Sam, an aspiring stand-up comedian struggling with PTSD from a sexual assault she experienced. When the teenager she used to nanny disappears, Sam struggles to decide whether or not to get involved in the search. It’s a tightrope of a performance, perhaps the most nuanced that Sennott has ever given, and one on which this character study rises and falls.
“I personally connected to the material,” says Sennott. “Most women have had some sort of negative sexual experience. I’ve known so many women and friends who have experienced stuff like this.”
And Sennott appreciated how “I Used to be Funny’s” writer and director Ally Pankiw told Sam’s story.
“She wrote about trauma in a very real way that we don’t always get to see in movies,” she says. “It can be very slow burning and long lasting. It’s a thing that has ups and downs.”
In the movie, Sam’s jokes have an edge to them, but they are still very funny. But it’s a humor that emerges out of a deep sense of pain. Sennott says that tracks, too.
“I felt like I was always at my best in standup when I was really depressed,” she says. “Even if I said them later on when I was feeling better, I’d think something’s missing. What was so exciting about getting to play Sam was digging into that place where you have to use humor and laugh at something because you’re in such pain. It eases the harshness to joke about it. It’s like, ‘I went through hell, but now I have two really fucked up jokes that I love telling.’ So there’s a silver lining to this whole miserable experience.”
