Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/SXSW
It takes a special kind of performer to play both a teenage-dirtbag lesbian who starts a fight club to get girls and a twentysomething nanny who’s recovering from PTSD while deciding whether or not to look for the missing girl she used to look after. It takes an even more impressive one to do both at the same festival. They don’t call Rachel Sennott the queen of South by Southwest for nothing. SXSW has loved Sennott for a while, but this year’s back-to-back releases feel different. This year feels like her official coronation as one of the most interesting performers in a generation.
Sennott’s two premieres at this year’s SXSW, Bottoms and I Used to Be Funny, could not be more different. But together, they represent what unites her performances at their best—a natural humanity that somehow shines through all of her characters’ eccentricities and grievances. They also outline just how much range she really has; Bottoms, which she co-wrote, is a mad-cap sexcapade á la Superbad, while I Used to Be Funny is a quieter (although still surprisingly funny) exploration of trauma.
Sennott’s seat on the festival throne has been years in the making. In 2018, she landed at SXSW with the short-film version of director Emma Seligman’s 2020 comedy Shiva Baby. (As director Seligman noted on stage at this year’s festival, Shiva Baby’s feature debut at SXSW never happened, because the festival was forced to cancel due to COVID-19.) Last year, Sennott returned to once again suffocate audiences with laughter during the premiere of Bodies Bodies Bodies. And this year she’s back with not one but two films—Seligman’s Shiva Baby follow-up, the raunchy and intentionally, deliriously nonsensical Bottoms, and the comedic drama I Used to Be Funny. As an amusing bonus, this year’s SXSW line-up also includes Appendage—a feature adaptation of a Hulu Halloween short starring, you guessed it, Sennott. (Hadley Robinson takes Sennott’s role in the feature version.)