Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photograph by Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
Every time Jean Evans sees a new actor in a movie, the first thing she does is pull out her phone and Google how old they are. She started doing this long before she packed up her Toyota Camry and moved from Missouri to Los Angeles five years ago to pursue a career in acting and filmmaking. But lately, something has changed. For a long time, “whenever I’d look up their ages, they were older than me. I’d be 20, they were 23, and I was like, Well, I have three years left to accomplish that.” Now that she’s 27 and they’re 23, she thinks, Oh, well I have negative four years left.
Evans estimates she auditioned for 200 roles last year and came close to getting life-changing parts in shows and independent features, but never quite landed the part. This fall, Evans was so burnt out by the incessant rejection that she went to Europe for a month, maxed out a credit card, and considered moving back home. “There’s the realer and realer possibility that it might not happen for me,” she says.
This kind of festering anxiety is widely felt by aspiring creative types in their late 20s and 30s whose peers are starting to surpass them. Then along came I Love LA to pour salt on the wound. The new HBO show follows a group of friends trying to make it big in an influencer-obsessed, Erewhon-pilled sliver of Los Angeles. It was also created, written by, and stars Rachel Sennott, whose successful circle — Ayo Edebiri, Molly Gordon, and Owen Thiele among them — has become inescapable, showing up in everything from Emmy-dominating TV shows to Oscar-bait movies and podcasts all over your “For You” page. The show has drawn endless comparisons to Girls, but while every member of that reckless New York friend group floundered in the search for fulfillment, the characters of Sennott’s L.A. are in subtle but intense competition with one another, from the nepo-baby friend with the Oscar-winning father to the frenemy who banks $10,000 for a single Instagram post.
Sennott plays Maia, a 27-year-old aspiring talent manager who’s still haunted by her former friend, New York “It” girl Tallulah (Odessa A’zion). While Tallulah’s influencer career appears to have blown up, Maia is still living in the same East Side rental where she moved half a decade ago, unable to earn even a small promotion from publicity assistant to junior manager. “Fuck Tallulah,” Maia declares after finally blocking her on Instagram. Hours later, Tallulah breezes into town with her je ne sais quoi and an enviable Balenciaga bag.
The night the show premiered, 34-year-old Tess Bellomo, one-half of the Right Answers Mostly history and pop-culture podcast, had a pit in her stomach. Watching TikToks of the “It” crowd at the premiere — where Sennott’s longtime friend Jordan Firstman and other cast members like Quenlin Blackwell and Leighton Meester (who plays Maia’s boss) partied with Charli XCX and Adela — made her feel lonely. For her and her co-host, 31-year-old Claire Donald, the show felt like someone was holding up a mirror to their own careers, spotlighting their insecurities about feeling behind or never making it at all. When Ronit Halmos, a 29-year-old native Angeleno and tech worker and aspiring TV actor, came across a video of an I Love LA cast party at the Chateau Marmont, all she could think was, I want to be there. Odessa A’zion went to her high school.
“Today I went on a muting spree — I just muted, like, all of young Hollywood on Instagram and TikTok, not because I don’t believe in them, not because I don’t think they’re beautiful and talented and fabulous, but because my mental health, as someone who lives in L.A. pursuing a career in acting and writing and content creation, simply cannot take watching them all gallivant together to parties and premieres,” the actor and podcaster Hannah Aaron Brown said in a TikTok after the show’s premiere. “It’s the same group of people, and they’re all so hot and talented and successful.” (Even True Whitaker, Forrest Whitaker’s daughter and one of the stars of I Love LA, was so desperate to book a project with Rachel Sennott, she says she manifested her appearance on the show with the help of a vision board.) Once Brown, who works a day job as a social-media manager and has booked only “a few lines in a movie” over the last eight years, finally watched the show, she struggled to watch an underdog story from someone so successful.
In Los Angeles, everyone has their own Tallulah, that person who’s doing better than you at every turn. When Brown was just starting out she recalls “gritting my teeth” to get noticed in the industry. Meanwhile, she had a friend who was “so magnetic, she could literally be waiting in line at the post office and get an audition.” Whenever Brown tried to be honest about her feelings, the sentiment made her friend “feel weird.” They stopped talking a few years ago, and Brown eventually unfollowed her.
The dozen 20- and 30-something actors and writers I spoke with all had versions of Brown’s story. A 31-year-old TV writer in Los Angeles employed in a writers’ room at a major streaming platform has worked entry-level jobs with writers who are now Emmy-nominated — she sees the news on Instagram, in the form of Deadline and Hollywood Reporter screenshots — and tries to reframe her envy as motivation. It’s not even necessarily better in the literary world. One aspiring New York writer spins out over younger novelists publishing books. He reminds himself young writing is naïve. “At the same time, I’m like, Am I just trying to console myself?”
Some are also dealing with the strangeness of being overtaken by those they once had the lead over. Charlie (not her real name), a 27-year-old Texas transplant who moved to L.A. six years ago as a full-time model, used to be the thriving one in her friend group, bringing them to parties and PR events for clothing lines and skin-care brands as her plus-ones. Now, the tables have turned. As one friend after another gets their big break, she’s been struggling to land acting roles. She’s now her friends’ plus-one to Emmys parties.
Meanwhile, I Love LA got renewed for a second season. Jordan Firstman just wrapped production on his directorial debut. In December, Odessa A’zion will have an even bigger breakout moment with Marty Supreme, the Josh Safdie movie she stars in alongside Timothée Chalamet. And while the struggle bus to break into creative industries has always been packed, it’s hard not to feel like the difficulties are hitting harder, as people compete for an ever dwindling number of opportunities. TV writing jobs fell off a cliff after the writers’ strikes, and fewer TV shows and movies are getting made overall. Those who still want to play the game face a bleak future for the industry shaped by AI, TikTok, and streaming slop.
Lina Cooper thinks about this all the time. The 25-year-old Ukrainian songwriter and musician is a personal assistant to a songwriter who made it big in the seventies; a few hit songs have set him and his children up for life. Cooper, on the other hand, named her second album “some random girl that never made it on the internet.” She knows jealousy so well she wrote and recorded a whole song about it. (“I open my eyes, then open my phone, and then I see a girl that has what I want / The day has just begun, I’m already mad / I want what you have, so fucking bad.”) A year ago, Cooper made a friend her age who was also doing music. She was newer to the scene than Cooper, and seemed to work less than she did, but she kept getting into important rooms and booking shows. “I’m like, How is she getting all of that?” The answer, she discovered later, was that she was paying a manager to set her up with the gigs. Because, of course, in L.A. — and in Maia and Talullah’s version of it — nothing is as ever as it seems. One day, the friend told Lina she admired her, that she was her motivation. “She was like, ‘I love how hard you work, your songwriting is amazing.’” Lina had no idea the friend looked up to her, and whatever jealousy she’d had, she let it go. It reminded her of the real talk Maia and Talullah have on the show, in which the seeming “It” girl admits she’s actually broke and flailing — her Balenciaga bag is actually stolen. “They’re trying to seem like they’re doing great, but they’re not,” Cooper says. “Then there’s this real moment where they’re like, ‘Actually, life really sucks for me right now. Like, I really hate it. I really don’t like it.’”
Even though her modeling career is going well, Charlie’s friends joke that she’s “just last,” that they’re waiting for her turn to come. Not so long ago, they were all waiting together. “It used to be a thing we all talked about: ‘I hate this, it’s so hard,’” Charlie says. But “it’s gotten a lot easier for some people” these days, and those talks don’t happen as often. If she could do what the I Love LA cast was doing, if she could put her own clique on television, she’d do it in an instant. The way she sees it, a rising tide lifts all boats. If, in season two, the I Love LA crew needs a girl at a bar to “throw some lines out,” she’d happily play the part.
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