“Is there only one way to have ‘authentic’ gay sex on tv?” asked Arnaud in an Instagram comment. “Should the sex that closeted hockey players have look like the sex that sceney LA gay guys have?”
Williams took the high road on his Instagram Story. “But truly go watch I Love LA! Jordan and the cast are great!!” he wrote.
The stars’ posts come after Firstman compared them to the sex scenes on his own HBO Max show, which he said a “straight guy could not write,” despite the fact that Heated Rivalry creator, writer and director Jacob Tierney being openly gay.
“Yeah, we’re going for it. It’s gay,” he told Vulture. “I’m sorry, I watched those first two episodes of Heated Rivalry, and it’s just not gay. It’s not how gay people f*ck. There’s so few things that actually show gay sex.”
Firstman later added that “a lot of people just want entertainment or to see two straight hockey players pretending to be gay and f*cking.”
After Heated Rivalry‘s two-episode premiere last month, LGBTQ fans have passionately taken to the show’s depiction of gay intimacy in the adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novel series.
Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov and Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander in ‘Heated Rivalry’ (Sabrina Lantos)
Williams previously told Deadline, “The sex scenes, we rehearse them so heavily and we knew what we were gonna do going in, that they’re also a lot of fun.”
“Yeah, it’s a dance, added his romantic lead Connor Storrie.
Arnaud explained to Deadline, “They chose people who believed in the usefulness of these scenes to tell that story. … I liked that our scenes with Kip [played by Robbie GK] were showing another side of sexuality, which is tentative and repressed and like role-play almost, and it’s just two people who are actually just giving in, and the joy of that.”
Josh Hutcherson was trying get the hell out of Los Angeles. For the better part of a decade, the “Hunger Games” star and his girlfriend, Spanish actor Claudia Traisac, had split their time between L.A. and Madrid, but the eight-hour time difference between the cities had grown wearying. So Hutcherson leased an apartment in Brooklyn, and in April of this year, the couple flew into New York City from Spain, eager to launch their new East Coast life — until, in the car from JFK, Hutcherson got a call from his agent.
“‘How do you feel about going back to the airport right now?’” Hutcherson recalls his agent asking. “I was like, ‘I don’t fucking feel good about it, not at all! Why?’”
The agent explained that Rachel Sennott, the buzzy star of indie hits “Bottoms” and “Shiva Baby,” was launching her first comedy series with HBO, and she wanted Hutcherson to play her character’s boyfriend. But it was going to start shooting in roughly two weeks, and the show’s eventual title doubled as its location: “I Love L.A.”
It was the phone call that Hutcherson had spent years waiting to get. He’d been acting since he was 9; he’d landed his first starring role at 13, in “Zathura: A Space Adventure”; he had a key supporting role in 2010 best picture nominee “The Kids Are All Right” at 16; and when he was 18, he was catapulted into global superstardom when he was cast as Peeta Mellark in “The Hunger Games.” But as Hutcherson drifted toward 30, the roles started to dry up.
“I went through a few years where it was kind of slim pickings, and I wasn’t doing much,” he says quietly, swirling his coffee cup outside a bistro in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood. “A lot of young actors don’t make the transition, or the industry kicks them out. I was kind of like, is this the time where I’m over it and done?”
Instead, at 33, Hutcherson is entering a new career peak. On Dec. 5, he’ll star in Blumhouse’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” adapted from the feverishly popular video game franchise — the first “Freddy’s” movie was an unexpected hit in 2023, grossing $292 million worldwide. And after scrambling to get out of his NYC lease, he did indeed join the cast of “I Love L.A.,” an experience that “reignited such a love and appreciation for this job in me,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to do an HBO comedy on Sunday night. That, to me, is a dream come true.”
Rachel Sennott and Josh Hutcherson in “I Love L.A.”
Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
On “I Love L.A.” — which premiered on Nov. 2, runs through Dec. 21 and was just renewed for a second season — Hutcherson plays Dylan, a schoolteacher who loves his live-in girlfriend Maia (Sennott), despite the chaos that her ambition to become a talent manager brings into his life.
“I grew up watching him in ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ and ‘The Hunger Games,’ and there’s something about him, how warm and lovely he is,” Sennott told Variety in October. “I was so impressed by his comedic and improv chops. But also, for audiences, I think you see him and you feel like he’s your boyfriend a little.”
Hutcherson smiles when I tell him Sennott’s reasoning for casting him. “I am known as the good-hearted golden boy, which I’m not mad about,” he says. He has tried to break free of that perception, most recently by playing the toxic tech bro villain in the 2024 Jason Statham action film “The Beekeeper.” But with “I Love L.A.,” Hutcherson says he was “happy to lean into” his Good Guy persona. “If it got me on set and shooting this with Rachel — it’s meant to be.”
Part of the appeal were the days during the eight-week shoot when Hutcherson literally walked to work. “The first script mentioned Erewhon and Tenants of the Trees and the reservoir,” he says, ticking off landmarks of L.A.’s Eastside. “That’s my circuit. That’s where I’ve been haunting for years.”
He also felt at home as the only character on the show who isn’t obsessed with breaking into show business. “Even though I’ve been doing this since I was 9, and I’m so wildly in this industry, I don’t feel like I am in so many ways,” he says. “I don’t go to events unless I need to be there. I’m not active on social media unless the studio is like, we need you to be. I’ve always been one foot in, one foot out. When I started, I didn’t have a hunger for becoming famous; I just wanted to make movies and TV shows. I feel like that aligns with Dylan. He just wants to exist and do something he cares about.”
The chance to play an everyday adult living in the world as it exists in 2025 is rare for any actor right now, and Hutcherson does not take it for granted. “I’ve grown up working with tennis balls and green screens,” he says. “I don’t have to try to convince the audience that we’re, like, X amount of years in the future in a dystopic society or that these animatronics are possessed by ghost children.”
Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
He’s referring, of course, to the “Freddy’s” movies, which revolve around a creepy, long-shuttered pizzeria joint à la Chuck E. Cheese and its homicidal robot animal mascots that are embodied by the spirits of murdered kids. The elaborate animatronic costumes created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop can be worn by the performers only for 30 minutes at a time before the weight and heat become overwhelming. And when they do have the costumes on, there’s no guarantee they’re going to work right.
“The stunt actor has to turn and look to the right, but then three people with remote controls have to make the eyes time with the blink,” Hutcherson says. “You’ll do 10 takes, because the animatronic movement isn’t quite working. That one take that the animatronic is perfect, you better be perfect too, because that’s the one that’s going in the movie.”
The sequel, Hutcherson estimates, has “more than double” the creatures from the first film, one of which, the character called Mangle, requires “a team of 10 or 12 people to operate.”
“And the animatronics might find a way to leave the pizzeria,” he adds, “which is a big deal.”
But wait, I say, didn’t the titular Freddy exit the pizzeria in the first movie?
“Yes, but there’s, like, certain rules of the game that —” he says, his voice slowing down and raising in pitch with each successive word. “It’s murky. And I don’t fully get it, but I know it’s a big deal that the animatronics that leave, leave. It’s a whole thing.”
When Hutcherson signed on to the first “Freddy’s,” he didn’t really grasp the size of the “absolutely rabid fan base” for the mid-2010s video games that inspired the films “until after the movie came out.” But as he talks about shooting the sequel — directed once again by Emma Tammi, and written by the game’s creator, Scott Cawthon — I get the feeling that Hutcherson is still simply along for the ride.
Josh Hutcherson and director Emma Tammi on the set of “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2”
Ryan Green / Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
“The main focus is making something that the FNAF fandom will go crazy for,” he says, pronouncing the acronym as the fans do: “fuh-naff.” “Sometimes I’m like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense! How can I possibly do this?’ And they’re like, ‘It’s from the game.’” He starts laughing as he puts up his hands in surrender. “‘All right, all right, all right, I’m on board, I’m on board.’ But it’s crazy.”
Satisfying the exacting expectations of a vocal fanbase is certainly familiar territory for Hutcherson, after spending half a decade with Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth inside the “Hunger Games” maelstrom. As his time with that franchise was coming to an end with 2015’s “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2,” Hutcherson says he went through a phase where he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. “I was like, ‘Fuck that,’” he says matter-of-factly. “I got thrust into a place of notoriety that I never dreamed of, never wanted. It took privacy from me.”
To this day, Hutcherson avoids crowded public places, including in Madrid, and strangers yelling “Peeta” at him is a daily occurrence. But he’s grown to appreciate everything that “The Hunger Games” has provided him, so much so that his face lights up when I bring up the prospect of making another film with the core team, including director Francis Lawrence and co-star Woody Harrelson. “I would love to be back on set with Francis, with Jen, with Liam, with Woody,” he says. “It would not take any convincing at all. I’d be there in a heartbeat.”
There’s a chance that could happen sooner than one may expect. Francis Lawrence is in production on an adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel “Sunrise on the Reaping,” which chronicles the Hunger Games experience from the perspective of Harrelson’s character Haymitch Abernathy when he was 16 — and ends with an epilogue set after the events of “Mockingjay,” featuring Haymitch, Peeta and series heroine Katniss Everdeen.
Hutcherson learned of that coda only as the book hit shelves in March. So, I ask, is he in the new movie?
He breaks into a massive grin. “That would be a dream come true,” he says, holding my gaze.
I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to communicate to me, I say.
“It would be a dream come true,” he repeats. “Do dreams come true? Sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes, yeah.”
It’s Maia’s birthday, and she’ll make up with her influencer bestie, Tallulah, if she wants to. Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
When I first moved to Los Angeles, everyone told me to give it “at least two years.” They said that’s how long it would take to find out whether I could live there. But to like it, let alone love it? Who knows! Everything was beautiful and nothing felt real. As a spinning Rachel Sennott put it in a bizarrely compelling 2020 video that’s essentially a succinct thesis statement for the dissertation that is her 2025 HBO show: “Come on! It’s L.A.! Haha! What?! It’s L.A.!” Basically: the girls who get it, get it. The girls who don’t, don’t.
I did, until I didn’t. Still, leaving proved a much more painful breakup than I’d ever expected because I really did learn to love so much about L.A. The food! The arts! The biodiversity! The vibrancy! L.A. can rule! But seeing some of its most insular instincts through Sennott’s eyes (and those of pilot director Lorene Scafaria) feels more familiar than I’d expected, too. As much as I Love LA will inevitably get compared to Lena Dunham’s Girls, I’m gonna throw it out there that its truest HBO ancestor is Entourage, with all the desperate social climbing and grimy Hollywood truths that implies.
This first episode opens with Maia (Sennott) waking up on her 27th birthday. She climbs on top of her sweetiepie boyfriend Dylan (fittingly played by professional onscreen sweetiepie Josh Hutcherson), and does her best to have a great time amid an ongoing earthquake, because “if we’re gonna die, I just wanna come.”
Once this noble mission is accomplished, she begins the traditional birthday tradition of whining about getting older. Dylan does his best to combat her blues, quickly realizing that the lovely sentiment of “every year you become more and more yourself” isn’t half as convincing to his girlfriend as, “and you’re skinnier now, which I know you love.” Yes, yes, she does. One crashout thus avoided, she opens Instagram and skids straight into another one. Her former best friend, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), just posted a pic from a campaign they worked on together in New York, before Tallulah apparently dumped Maia for a bigger-name manager.
Stewing in fresh rage, she sets off to meet her friends Charlie (Jordan Firstman) and Alani (True Whitaker) for a brisk coffee walk around Silver Lake Reservoir, a classic meetup mode for anyone in L.A. vaguely committed to “healthy living” but not enough to hike. Maia absorbs the glow of compliments on her new haircut before going in on Tallulah, because she’s at the point of a friendship breakup where she needs everyone around her to agree that the friend in question sucks. Ever since Tallulah went from It Girl to #influencer, Maia’s resentment has calcified into a bitter pill she refuses to swallow. She was the one who turned Tallulah’s wildness into something marketable, she says. “I’m not gonna sit around and do nothing while she reaps the benefit of my hard work!” And so, with Charlie’s enthusiastic encouragement, Maia blocks Tallulah and feels, she insists, amazing.
Unfortunately, that brief high of righteousness quickly wears off when she clocks in for her thankless job as a publicity assistant. It disappears for good when her #girlboss Alyssa (Leighton Meester, who’s always welcome on my screen even while playing someone who gives me hives) rejects her case for a promotion. Scafaria’s close-ups on Sennott’s face throughout this pilot, such as in this scene with Alyssa hemming and hawing in the background, are so good. When Maia grits her teeth and brings up her experience managing Tallulah — now known to thousands as It Girl Tallulah Steele — it’s clear how much it pains her to pull that card.
Imagine Maia’s shock, then, when she gets home after work only to be tackled by the tornado that is a half-naked Tallulah herself, squealing “happy birthday!!!!1” as if nothing ever happened. Apparently, Alani flew her out to L.A. as a birthday surprise. (Gotta love daddy’s Oscar-winning money!) Sennott’s always had such compelling charisma, so it says something that A’zion immediately makes Tallulah so over-the-top magnetic — with, it must be said, incredible hair — that it’s easy to understand Maia’s insecurities by comparison. Having a friend who’s hot and fun in such a natural way that she can just make things happen is a blessing when it benefits you, and a curse when you inevitably get left behind.
But Sennott’s script is smart not to make Maia such a killjoy straightman opposite Tallulah. All I need to understand how these two were friends is their exchange as they wait in the line for the club Maia swore she didn’t want to go to:
Talullah: “You remember when I got roofied at Mr. Purple?”
Maia: “Yeah, that night was insane. They used to roofie people here, but then they fixed it.”
Tallulah: “Ugh, bummer.”
Maia: “Yeah, I know.”
These two, to quote a dearly departed HBO show, really did used to be The Disgusting Brothers.
We don’t see what happens after Tallulah somehow meets the club owner in the 30 seconds it takes Maia to humiliate herself while trying to cut the line. But it’s enough to leave Maia too hungover the next day to eat the supposedly great bagels Charlie waited so long in line for, or to join Tallulah when she insists they have to blow off her other plans and go to the beach. (What?? It’s L.A.!) Fed up and exhausted, Maia leaves Tallulah and Alani to go off on an idyllic montage — set to Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” obv — of getting stoned, hitting up Erewhon and vintage shops, and looking hot in bathing suits. Maia, meanwhile, spends all day frantically trying to get her fancy birthday dinner reservation to accept a fifth person at the last minute.
But by the time she and Dylan get to dinner, the reservation doesn’t even matter anymore, because Tallulah’s pulled another Tallulah. The extremely unimpressed hostess leads them away from the restaurant and up to an adjoining hotel suite, which Tallulah somehow managed to land for a mini surprise party. Even Charlie’s now “totally obsessed” with her, to Maia’s obvious annoyance. Worse still is the fact that Talullah also invited Alyssa, because Maia had told her that they were “basically best friends” instead of admitting that she didn’t get the promotion. The biggest indignity of all, though? Tallulah got the suite in exchange by telling the hotel that she was celebrating her birthday. When the cake comes floating towards Maia and the words “Happy Birthday, Talullah!” come into focus, it is, understandably, Maia’s 13th reason of the day.
Maia leaves her own party to be alone; Tallulah, refusing to read the room, goes after her. Though Dylan tries to follow, Charlie and Alani know better than to let him. It’s time for the girls to finally be honest in that most sacred of friendship spaces: the bathroom.
Sick of pretending she’s fine, Maia tells Tallulah the truth: “Having you here just reminds me of how good you’re doing without me, and I’m a fucking flop.” Luckily for her ego, though, they’re both flops! Tallulah reveals that she’s not only broke, but that she caught the rich guy she was dating DM’ing women for “titty pics.” At this, Maia’s instantly back on her side. “Ew! I’m sorry, just Google ‘boobs.’” Look, it may not be a cute instinct, but sometimes, all you need to get over a grudge with someone you truly love is to realize you’re on the same level (and that some men are gross and unoriginal, obviously).
With that, Maia and Tallulah are back. With only a Balenciaga bag and an incredible face card to her name, Tallulah decides that she may as well stay in L.A. — with Maia as her manager for real. As Peaches’ “Boys Wanna Be Her” kicks off, they yowl, “we’re gonna fucking KILL IT” in each other’s faces and scamper back into the suite, where a male stripper’s already getting the party started on Alyssa’s lap. After getting her own spin with him, Maia grabs Tallulah’s phone and directs her into the limelight instead. As long as they’re a team again, she doesn’t mind being the brains behind the star — until, inevitably, she does.
• As a Gemini moon (iykyk), I’m comfortable saying that of course Tallulah is a Gemini. Good luck with that Saturn Return, babes!
• Dylan being a guy whose day almost gets ruined by his bookmark falling out is a tiny detail, but a perfect one.
• “I can’t get another UTI. The doctor said if I get another one, I can’t Zoom in for meds anymore.”
• “You don’t see me hanging out with Avicii anymore, do you?” “Yeah, because he died.”
I Love LA doesn’t do a particularly good job announcing itself with its pilot, so to give you a better sense, I’ll spoil a joke. (If you’d prefer not to know this spoiler, feel free to skip to the next paragraph, but I assure you: This is not the show’s best or most interesting punch line.) In the second episode, Rachel Sennott’s Maia and Odessa A’zion’s Tallulah meet with the latter’s rival from New York, a polished blonde influencer who claims Tallulah stole her Balenciaga bag. The visit is meant to mend fences; naturally, it devolves into a cocaine-fueled nightmare caught on video. The footage leaks online, and Maia’s gentle teacher boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), learns his coke-snorting face has become a meme, “Coke Larry,” while chaperoning the school carnival. (“Because I’m doing coke and they say I look like my name would be Larry,” he tells Maia desperately.) As his dowdy principal approaches, Dylan braces for the inevitable: getting fired, fighting with his girlfriend — the classic spiral. “Are you Coke Larry?” the principal asks and Dylan sheepishly confirms. “I’ve got a … golf trip next weekend?” his boss stammers. “A couple of high-school buddies of mine. I don’t want to let them down …” The beat stretches, the principal is eventually pulled away (“Great job on those snickerdoodles!”), and Dylan realizes he has to procure coke for his boss. That shouldn’t be a problem, though; Maia’s buddy will hook him up. The show moves on, as if to say, This is L.A. after all.
The heart of a series like I Love LA lies in its ability to capture what it feels like to be young — when your heart still sings with possibility and ambition, a vital defense in a world all too ready to pelt you with disappointments. When you’re starting your career, you have not yet learned how to be properly cynical (another excellent half-hour debut from this year, FX’s Adults, vibrates at the same frequency), and Maia and Tallulah’s relationship gives the show a buoyant us-against-the-world energy, a sense of shared delusion and drive that powers both its comedy and its ache. This type of striving 20-something comedy draws the unavoidable comparisons — Insecure for the influencer age, Girls for zillennials, Broad City out west — but I Love LA ultimately adds up to far more than the sum of its lineage.
As Maia, Sennott plays into and against the flopping-sexpot persona she honed in filmwork like Shiva Baby, Bottoms, and Bodies Bodies Bodies. Maia’s eager and ambitious in the way you have to be to break through in Los Angeles, and her boss at the creative agency Alyssa 180 doesn’t quite take her seriously. (The titular Alyssa is played by a scene-stealing Leighton Meester, on quite the run right after setting the house on fire in Nobody Wants This.) Maia is supported by an inner circle including stylist Charlie (Jordan Firstman), kind but clueless nepo baby Alani (True Whitaker), and Dylan, whose interests skew more toward board games and World War II than TikTok and brand deals. Their status quo shatters when Maia’s former bestie, buzzy “It” girl Tallulah, blows into town, and by the end of the pilot, an estrangement born of distance and perceived success gives way to a renewed connection: Maia sees an opportunity to work with Tallulah, reigniting both her career and their friendship. That first episode suffers from the need to do so much heavy lifting and feels both overstuffed and overly conventional, but once all the pieces are in place, the show relaxes into itself and its actual voice emerges.
I Love LA is a showcase for Sennott, who also created and writes on it, and Maia’s funniest moments spring from cringe humor, including a standout jealous outburst taken to sublime extremes. What makes Maia so compelling is how the character seems to be a mystery to herself. She hustles without knowing why or what it’ll cost her, and that ambition leads to clashes with Alyssa. Whenever their conflict comes to a head, Sennott’s face betrays a fascinating tension: committed yet confused, a deer in the headlights gripping a knife. Her performance syncs with an ensemble teetering at the edge of cartoonishness but never tumbling over, a balance owed to a writing team attuned to the cast’s chemistry and aware of the lines it shouldn’t cross.
It’s tough to pinpoint a standout in a group of killers this sharp, but Whitaker’s Alani, a kindhearted airhead, consistently delivers some of the show’s best asides and strangest beats. Hutcherson, meanwhile, is a straight-man revelation, his earnest, odd-man-out presence grounding the show’s otherwise manic energy. Jury’s still out on whether I Love LA effectively bottles the sensibility of its generation, but at the very least, its visual palette will stand as a time capsule for this peculiar moment in culture when Los Angeles teems with influencers chasing clout. The gang’s costuming is a running progression of world-building and sight gags: Tallulah’s loud, barely-there outfits mirror the hyperperformative ambition of the influencer world she inhabits, while Charlie’s elaborate, layered wardrobe underscores how each character plugs into a different version of the L.A. professional aspiration.
These dynamics animate the show’s set pieces: the scramble for brand deals, encounters with the bizarre fauna of L.A. celebrity, flirtations with the next echelon of fame and wealth. The energy of each episode stems from these pursuits, but at its core, I Love LA believes the fantasy that ambition and friendship might be enough to build a life in a city and professional world designed to break you. The series has a deep bench of accomplished EPs, including Lorene Scafaria, Max Silvestri, Emma Barrie, and Aida Rodgers; Barrie and Rodgers are Barry alums, and their influence seeps into the show’s deadpan Hollywood surreality, though I Love LA swaps Barry’s existential darkness for something more sparkly and hopeful. The result is a comedy that’s both precise and unhinged, absurdly funny yet emotionally true — a portrait of youthful ambition and friendship that makes someone slightly older both grateful to not be that young anymore and just a little envious of those who are.
