Photo: Elliot & Erick Jiménez for New York Magazine

True Whitaker knew she’d find her way into Rachel Sennott’s HBO comedy, I Love LA, long before she knew the project existed. A year before her audition in 2024, Whitaker had put together a vision board that included the logo for Deadline, which reports on casting announcements online, pasted next to an image of Sennott, whose go-for-broke cringe comedy in Shiva Baby and Bottoms she’d admired from a distance. As Whitaker would later discover, Sennott was working on a series, initially titled Untitled Rachel Sennott Project, about a group of friends in Los Angeles making their way through the lower tiers of the entertainment industry. Lying somewhere between Girls and Broad City, with more than a little Instagram-age Entourage thrown in, I Love LA follows aspiring talent manager Maia (Sennott) and her complicated relationship with her “It”-girl friend, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion). Whitaker heard about the pilot from a friend who was auditioning for Tallulah, loved the script, and reached out to her agent to see if there were any other roles available. There were. I Love LA’s quartet of main characters is filled out by Maia’s gay best friend, Charlie (Jordan Firstman), and a spacey but sweet college friend named Alani, who’s the daughter of an Oscar-winning director.

That was exactly the right part for Whitaker. She could identify with the material for the audition: a scene, eventually cut from the pilot, in which Alani and Maia’s boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), argue over which cake to get for Maia’s birthday. “He was pushing for Milk Bar, and I was pushing for Sweet Lady Jane,” Whitaker tells me. “I was like, Wow, this is so L.A.-coded. When my mom was having a baby shower for me, she used a Sweet Lady Jane cake. I would 100 percent take that over Milk Bar any day.”

As you may have gathered from her last name, Whitaker is the daughter of the Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker and actress Keisha Nash, and like Alani, she was raised in a very particular bubble of sunny Southern California privilege. There are clear differences between the character and the performance—for one, Alani’s father isn’t also a revered dramatic actor, and if you know your L.A. private schools, Alani went to Crossroads, while Whitaker went to Oakwood—but there are also so many similarities, which Whitaker, 27, says she is happy to embrace. Once she landed the role of Alani, Whitaker went in for a meeting with I Love LA’s writers, who said they were interested in fleshing out the character, and freely dished about her upbringing and, as she puts it, her traumas.

That all became material for Alani, down to a scene in I Love LA’s second episode that re-creates a version of that very meeting. Alani wanders into the offices of her dad’s production company, where she has a vanity title of “VP of creative projects,” to pick up a package. Soon, she ends up in a meeting where they’re developing a modern TV version of Clueless, and they pump her for information and inspiration. (It’s a nice touch that Clueless comes up in that scene: Sennott gave Whitaker the note to look at Cher Horowitz as a reference.) “I really did come in and was like, ‘What do you want to know?’ And then really overshared,” Whitaker says, adding that when she saw that conversation reimagined in the script, she reacted like the girls in Euphoria who are shocked to discover that a friend has written a play about their lives: “I was just being vulnerable and honest. I was like, ‘Let’s make art!’”

With Sennott in I Love LA.
Photo: HBO

Whitaker would like to clarify that, unlike Alani, she definitely did not date a 28-year-old who took her to Katsuya Brentwood when she was in the eighth grade, but she is open about her life in a way that’s refreshing and charming, both in performance and in person. We meet up one afternoon in October at Cafe Mogador in the East Village, where Whitaker lives; she’s wearing a chic sweatshirt. Like her I Love LA character, Whitaker seems to have a way of making the world work in her favor. When I arrive at her table, she has managed to order shakshuka just before the kitchen closes, while a waitress politely but firmly tells me I’ve missed my chance.

In the show, Alani is always respectful and enthusiastic about her dad, who’s implied to be something of a Spike Lee figure. Whitaker feels the same about her father’s accomplishments. She has memories of calling him at 8 years old when he was in the process of playing Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, she tells me, and realizing that he wasn’t able to break out of his Ugandan accent. “My dad has mastered his craft and has really been so inspiring,” Whitaker says. “I’m not ashamed of nepotism in that way.” In a later episode of I Love LA, the characters happen to uncover a rival who goes by a different last name to hide her family connections (in this case, the last name is “Rikers”). Whitaker never considered trying to go incognito like that. “We’ve come from a slave background in America. I’m proud of the way he’s been able to make a name for himself,” she says.

Whitaker grew up in the San Fernando Valley and remembers performing in skits to entertain her parents—she’s a natural ham, the youngest of four siblings, including her parents’ children from previous relationships—but didn’t begin her acting career until she got older. Her father didn’t want her to be a child actor and insisted she hone her technique before committing to the field. In high school, she played basketball; she jokes that she was “just trying to work through my teenage feelings, honestly,” instead of doing anything in the theater program. But once she went off to NYU in 2017, where she studied creative writing through Gallatin, she got more passionate about acting. She learned the Method at the university’s Stella Adler Studio of Acting, but also has strong memories of overcommitting for the sake of comedy while taking a remote musical-theater class in the midst of COVID. “I did a full performance of ‘Just You Wait’ from My Fair Lady with choreography that I had come up with and everything,” she remembers. “Everyone else just sang their song with their computer in their lap. But you know what? You can’t say I didn’t go for it.”

Photo: Elliot & Erick Jiménez for New York Magazine

Whitaker’s somewhat gonzo approach to comedy makes her a breakout among the I Love LA ensemble. Her first TV role, which she booked after college, was a serious part as a drug addict on Godfather of Harlem, which stars her father. But on Sennott’s series, she gets to show off a remarkable sense of timing and physicality. Alani doesn’t need to work and doesn’t have the same drive to succeed as Sennott’s ambitious manager or Firstman’s stylist, but she’s deeply invested in holding her friend group together despite its many rifts. Whitaker imbues the character with a warm, if occasionally manic, desire for everyone to get along, something like Phoebe from Friends crossed with Toni from Girlfriends and Shoshanna from Girls. In one scene, while the other characters are fighting, Whitaker was supposed to just be standing and watching but decided it would be funnier if she started doing yoga, as if Alani were trying to calm everyone down. In I Love LA’s standout episode, the characters all end up at a party at Elijah Wood’s house, and we discover that Alani has long harbored a crush on the actor. Whitaker hadn’t seen the Lord of the Rings films since she was a kid but rewatched them in a weekend before filming “to get the excitement there.” She improvised shouting “I’ll always love you!” in Elvish at him after consulting ChatGPT.

You get the sense, too, that Whitaker is amused and excited by the prospect of I Love LA bringing her a sudden rush of attention. Over the past two years, Whitaker has been processing the death of her mother—she has been wearing the jewelry her mom gave her as a reminder of her since and has a purple ring that she got as a graduation gift on when we meet—and when we talk, her family hasn’t seen the show just yet. She’s eager for everyone to watch the episode at the end of this season when we meet Alani’s father. (He’s not played by her actual dad but by a well-known actor who’s old friends with him; True called Forest from the set and then put both of her dads in touch over FaceTime.)

In the cast, Whitaker is among actors who already have cult followings, and she told me Sennott was delighted to send her fan edits of Alani from the show’s trailer. She hasn’t asked for advice on what it might be like to become a new Gen-Z favorite—“I cannot think how to bring that up without them being like, ‘Oh please,’” Whitaker says, laughing, “being like, ‘What if I become so famous?’”—but she seems braced for whatever happens and seasoned enough by a childhood saturated in the industry. Already, she’s game to correct the record about how she’s been described in the press. In a cover story for Variety, Sennott said she was charmed by Whitaker announcing during her audition that she had kept her dad’s Emmy for the 2003 TV movie Door to Door under her pillow for good luck. “It’s even worse: I took the Emmy outside with crystals under a full moon, and every time I walked by, I would pause and manifest next to it,” Whitaker says. “You can have your opinion on that, but it’s too big to fit under my pillow.”

Production Credits

  • Photographs by
    Elliot & Erick Jiménez
  • Styling by
    Nycole Sariol
  • Hair by
    Nai’vasha using Curl Queen at The Wall Group
  • Makeup by
    Allie Smith at MA+Group
  • Top by
    Erdem
  • Dress by
    Loewe
  • Earrings by
    Bernard James

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the November 17, 2025, issue of
New York Magazine.

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the November 17, 2025, issue of
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