Power Bottoms

Power Bottoms,How Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott, and Ayo Edebiri came together to make “Bottoms,” a movie about two lesbian teen losers who start an after-school fight club under the auspices of sisterhood but actually do it just so they can get laid.

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It was 2015 in New York City. 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. 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.

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. 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. (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. “Well, I don’t care about getting in because I’m just going to do comedy by myself,” Sennott said. “This gives me a better push to go out in the city, where there are mics if you look for them.”

Cover Story

Finally, the horny, bloody lesbian incel comedy America has been waiting for.

Photo: Bobby Doherty

Our last stop of the night is a private room at Sing Sing Karaoke. After this, they’ll go their separate ways for a while: Edebiri is flying to Paris Fashion Week, and once the strike wraps, she’s filming an undisclosed role in Marvel’s Thunderbolts. Sennott is headed back to L.A. and, in September, will be in a film, the Italian period piece Finalmente L’Alba, premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Seligman will go back to Bushwick, where she’s already working on other scripts. She doesn’t see herself solely as a comedic filmmaker — “I want to make something of every genre” — citing people like Denis Villenueve and Greta Gerwig as inspirations. She’s not opposed to going full franchise mode, “making a cool, fucking artsy multimillion-dollar movie on a Marvel level.”

Will Bottoms allow them to keep doing their specific brand of gonzo comedy, or will they inevitably level up and lose some of that NYU-bred magic? Will they keep making weird shit together, or will they each get sucked into the rapidly whirring fan of the IP machine? Does Bottoms mark the beginning of something or the end of it? Edebiri and Sennott express a desire to keep at least one foot firmly planted in the Seligman Cinematic Universe, wherever it goes, but they’re also shooting their Hollywood shots — Edebiri says she wants an acting career like Emma Stone’s, while continuing to write and produce, and Sennott is currently writing a movie she’d like to direct.

At Sing Sing, Edebiri admits that she can, on top of everything else, sing. She instantly puts on Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and does a staggeringly good rendition, hitting the falsetto effortlessly from a casual seated position. “It’s pure terrorism to do this song,” she says by way of explanation. “I only do terrorism joints.”

“That’s Mommy,” says Sennott.

Edebiri searches the catalogue for her next song: “They don’t have Creed? What the hell!”

Sennott, who lost her voice at a Bottoms screening in Provincetown over the weekend, talk-sings Taylor Swift’s “Paris.” “I wanna brainwash you / Into loving me forever,” she says in an extra-gravelly alto. Seligman, who says she’s shy and doesn’t love karaoke, wonders aloud about doing a song from Wicked or Little Shop of Horrors.

She polls the room: “I want to do a Rent song we all know. Do we all know ‘Take Me or Leave Me’?”

Edebiri raises her eyebrows. “Be serious now. In this room? Be for real.”

All three belt the song from start to finish with perfect recall. “Women?!” they scream into their mics. “What is it about them? Can’t live! With them or without them.” It’s about a pair of batshit lesbians engaged in a psychosexual drama of their own making, all in the name of getting laid. They occasionally want to murder each other but have once-in-a-generation chemistry.

Production Credits

Photographs by Bobby Doherty
Styling by Daniel Gaines
On Ayo Edebiri: Hair by Ro Morgan
On Ayo Edebiri: Makeup by Kirin Bhatty
On Rachel Sennott: Hair by Edward Lampen
On Emma Seligman: Hair by Clara Leonard
On Emma Seligman: Makeup by Mia Jones
On the cover and third portrait: On Edebiri: Brooks Brothers shirt, a sweater from the Society Archive, and Boss pants. On Sennott: Rowing Blazers shirt and a Ralph Lauren sweater, belt, and shoes. On Seligman: Brooks Brothers jacket and sweater, Ralph Lauren pants, and Oliver Peoples sunglasses.
First portrait: On Edebiri: Gucci pants and Church’s shoes. On Sennott: Brooks Brothers shirt, Gucci pants, and Oliver Peoples glasses. On Seligman: Ralph Lauren pants.
Second portrait: On Edebiri: Flannel shirt and T-shirt from the Society Archive. On Sennott: T-shirt, shorts, and shoes from the Society Archive. On Seligman: Bode shirt.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the August 28, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.

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