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\n Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photograph by Kenny Laubbacher\/HBO\n <\/p>\n
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, \u201cwhenever I\u2019d look up their ages, they were older than me. I\u2019d be 20, they were 23, and I was like, Well, I have three years left to accomplish that.\u201d Now that she\u2019s 27 and they\u2019re 23, she thinks, Oh, well I have negative four years left.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cThere\u2019s the realer and realer possibility that it might not happen for me,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 Ayo Edebiri, Molly Gordon, and Owen Thiele among them \u2014 has become inescapable, showing up in everything from Emmy-dominating TV shows to Oscar-bait movies and podcasts all over your \u201cFor You\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Sennott plays Maia, a 27-year-old aspiring talent manager who\u2019s still haunted by her former friend, New York \u201cIt\u201d girl Tallulah (Odessa A\u2019zion). While Tallulah\u2019s 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. \u201cFuck Tallulah,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The night the show premiered, 34-year-old Tess Bellomo, one-half of the Right Answers Mostly<\/a> history and pop-culture podcast, had a pit in her stomach. Watching TikToks of the \u201cIt\u201d crowd at the premiere \u2014 where Sennott\u2019s longtime friend Jordan Firstman and other cast members like Quenlin Blackwell and Leighton Meester (who plays Maia\u2019s boss) partied with Charli XCX and Adela\u00a0\u2014 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\u2019zion went to her high school.<\/p>\n \u201cToday I went on a muting spree \u2014 I just muted, like, all of young Hollywood on Instagram and TikTok, not because I don\u2019t believe in them, not because I don\u2019t think they\u2019re 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,\u201d the actor and podcaster Hannah Aaron Brown<\/a> said in a TikTok<\/a> after the show\u2019s premiere. \u201cIt\u2019s the same group of people, and they\u2019re all so hot and talented and successful.\u201d (Even True Whitaker, Forrest Whitaker\u2019s 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<\/a> with the help of a vision board.) Once Brown, who works a day job as a social-media manager and has booked only \u201ca few lines in a movie\u201d over the last eight years, finally watched the show, she struggled to watch an underdog story from someone so successful.<\/p>\n In Los Angeles, everyone has their own Tallulah, that person who\u2019s doing better than you at every turn. When Brown was just starting out she recalls \u201cgritting my teeth\u201d to get noticed in the industry. Meanwhile, she had a friend who was \u201cso magnetic, she could literally be waiting in line at the post office and get an audition.\u201d Whenever Brown tried to be honest about her feelings, the sentiment made her friend \u201cfeel weird.\u201d They stopped talking a few years ago, and Brown eventually unfollowed her.<\/p>\n The dozen 20- and 30-something actors and writers I spoke with all had versions of Brown\u2019s story. A 31-year-old TV writer in Los Angeles employed in a writers\u2019 room at a major streaming platform has worked entry-level jobs with writers who are now Emmy-nominated \u2014 she sees the news on Instagram, in the form of Deadline and Hollywood Reporter screenshots \u2014 and tries to reframe her envy as motivation. It\u2019s 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 na\u00efve. \u201cAt the same time, I\u2019m like, Am I just trying to console myself?\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s been struggling to land acting roles. She\u2019s now her friends\u2019 plus-one to Emmys parties.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, I Love LA got renewed for a second season. Jordan Firstman just wrapped production on his directorial debut<\/a>. In December, Odessa A\u2019zion will have an even bigger breakout moment with Marty Supreme<\/a>, the Josh Safdie movie she stars in alongside Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet. And while the struggle bus to break into creative industries has always been packed, it\u2019s 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<\/a> after the writers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201csome random girl that never made it on the internet.\u201d She knows jealousy so well she wrote and recorded a whole song<\/a> about it. (\u201cI open my eyes, then open my phone, and then I see a girl that has what I want \/ The day has just begun, I\u2019m already mad \/ I want what you have, so fucking bad.\u201d) 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. \u201cI\u2019m like, How is she getting all of that?\u201d 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. \u2014 and in Maia and Talullah\u2019s version of it \u2014 nothing is as ever as it seems. One day, the friend told Lina she admired her, that she was her motivation. \u201cShe was like, \u2018I love how hard you work, your songwriting is amazing.\u2019\u201d Lina had no idea the friend looked up to her, and whatever jealousy she\u2019d had, she let it go. It reminded her of the real talk Maia and Talullah have on the show, in which the seeming \u201cIt\u201d girl admits she\u2019s actually broke and flailing \u2014 her Balenciaga bag is actually stolen. \u201cThey\u2019re trying to seem like they\u2019re doing great, but they\u2019re not,\u201d Cooper says. \u201cThen there\u2019s this real moment where they\u2019re like, \u2018Actually, life really sucks for me right now. Like, I really hate it. I really don\u2019t like it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Even though her modeling career is going well, Charlie\u2019s friends joke that she\u2019s \u201cjust last,\u201d that they\u2019re waiting for her turn to come. Not so long ago, they were all waiting together. \u201cIt used to be a thing we all talked about: \u2018I hate this, it\u2019s so hard,\u2019\u201d Charlie says. But \u201cit\u2019s gotten a lot easier for some people\u201d these days, and those talks don\u2019t 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\u2019d 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 \u201cthrow some lines out,\u201d she\u2019d happily play the part.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n