Five and six years after their respective matriculations, they’ve come together to make an extremely gay, impressively bloody, simultaneously fun-dumb and incisively smart studio comedy, Bottoms - directed by Seligman, co-written by Sennott and Seligman, and starring Edebiri and Sennott. The three have been filming shorts and sketches, writing scripts, and doing stand-up (with Seligman, not a comedian, watching from the audience supportively) together since their days at Tisch, from which Seligman and Edebiri, who are 28 and 27, graduated in 2017 and Sennott, 27, graduated in 2018. “But I did give it to you and changed your life, so … ,” Seligman replies lovingly. “Emma was like, ‘You can have the role if you pay for half of lunch,’” Sennott says. “Emma was like, ‘I’m Steven Soderbergh,’” says Edebiri. “And I was like, ‘Am I going to be in this or what?’” Okay, it was more like three or four times: an audition, a callback, a chemistry read, then a long lunch to go over all the beats of the character. “She had me audition ten fucking times,” says Sennott, digging into the hummus. Seligman, who studied film and TV production and uses she/they pronouns, first met Sennott when the latter ditched acting class to audition for Seligman’s senior-thesis short, Shiva Baby, a dark comedy about the central Jewish tenets of sex and death. Marks Place bar-and-food crawl of their erstwhile haunts. It’s a 90-degree June evening in Manhattan, and Edebiri and Sennott, along with the filmmaker Emma Seligman, their close friend and a fellow NYU grad, are sweatily crammed around a table in the back of Cafe Mogador, the first stop on a St. “ She’s blackout drunk, but she believes there’s another way,” Sennott says in a singsongy rasp. “I was like, Who the fuck is this?” says Edebiri, laughing. “This gives me a better push to go out in the city, where there are mics if you look for them.” “Well, I don’t care about getting in because I’m just going to do comedy by myself,” Sennott said. (Indeed, some of their peers who did get in ended up exactly where they thought they’d be: SNL hired the Please Don’t Destroy boys, a sketch-comedy group comprised of NYU alums Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy.) Shortly thereafter, Edebiri noticed Sennott at a party on a friend’s roof, drunkenly ranting to fellow aspiring comedian Moss Perricone. Neither got into any of the groups, a fate that at the time felt like the doors at 30 Rock were preemptively slamming in their faces. Rachel Sennott, a freshman acting student, and Ayo Edebiri, a sophomore teaching student (who’d soon switch to dramatic writing), first passed each other in the hallway after one of their auditions. The key, as historically proved by their forebears, was making it into one of the highly competitive on-campus sketch, improv, or stand-up groups - ideally Hammerkatz or Dangerbox or Astor Place Riots - and riding those waves to their seemingly inevitable destinations: Saturday Night Live Comedy Central a series on FX or the CW or HBO. Hamilton was on Broadway, Donald Trump was hosting Saturday Night Live, and, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a fresh crop of comedy kids was striving to become fuck-you famous.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |