In True’s orbit

Late January light spills across True Whitaker’s East Village flat, pooling over the chunky sweater the actor is curled into at her desk. Before I can even say hello, a bubbly, distinctly Californian lilt rings out of my laptop speakers. ​“Oh. Em. Gee,” she says. ​“Hiiii!” It’s the same buoyant sing-song True brings to Alani Marcus in I Love LA, creator/​star Rachel Sennott’s hit HBO series about a group of twentysomethings trying, and mostly failing, to make it in a) Los Angeles and b) the creative industries. It’s Girls meets Entourage, if both had been force-fed the last decade-and-a-half of the internet, and already one of the defining comedies of the mid-2020s.

Alani is a wealthy, spiritually-inclined nepo baby who happens to be the daughter of an Oscar-winning filmmaker. It’s a detail that isn’t far from True’s own reality: her dad is Forest Whitaker, who won an Oscar for his role in 2006 film The Last King of Scotland. Alani is also known, like True, for dropping great one-liners and, not like True, for trying to have a threesome with Elijah Wood– more on that later.

True, a Los Angeles native, has lived in New York for the last decade. The actor studied creative writing at NYU’s Gallatin and trained as an actor at Stella Adler. This, then, is her city. Getting her on a call wasn’t exactly easy, though. But three weeks, three reschedules and one snowstorm later, here we are. Outside, Manhattan moves at half-speed under a thick layer of snow. For True, 27, this is an opportune time to rest.

Things have been nonstop recently – back-to-back red-eye flights, long days on set, a calendar that fills itself. And now, as if that all wasn’t disorienting enough, people are recognising her on the street. It’s new enough that you can see her processing it in real time: excitement, disbelief, a flicker of panic and, finally, amusement. ​“I was walking around the Silver Lake Reservoir in LA the other day,” she says, her eyes lighting up, ​“and these girls were like: ​‘Oh my God, it’s you… You’re on that show!’”

The reservoir is where we first meet Alani, too. In I Love LA’s opening episode, she circles its path with her friends Maia (Rachel), an ambitious talent manager itching for a promotion, and Charlie (Jordan Firstman), a social-climbing stylist with a soft side. They’re dissecting Maia’s latest beef with frenemy Tallulah (recent FACE cover star Odessa A’zion), a New York It-girl fresh from starring in her very first Heaven by Marc Jacobs campaign – a rite of passage for any worthwhile clout farmer. Charlie, who has never met Tallulah in person, urges Maia to block her immediately. Alani disagrees: ​“That just invites negative karma.”

By that afternoon, Tallulah is on a plane – Alani has encouraged her to fly to Los Angeles, convinced that whatever’s broken can be fixed if everyone’s together. It’s a classic Alani move: well-intentioned, if slightly misplaced, and it sets the entire season in motion. ​“She really is a ball of sunshine,” True says, smiling big and bright, adding that: ​“Alani is never really the problem.”

Ironically, True stumbled into the role in a very LA way. While helping a friend who was auditioning for Talullah go through her lines, she liked what she read of Alani in the script, got her agent on the phone and asked if she could audition, too. While she waited to hear back, True took Alani with her everywhere. ​“I’d be at a party or a bar or even a bathhouse, and I’d just turn to a random person and start [an Alani] monologue, just to really get it in my body,” she says. Her dad, she adds, has one rule when it comes to acting: when a character is close to who you are, don’t overwork it. ​“He always says it’s better to just live it and do what your body tells you to.”

When it came time to audition for Alani, Forest helped her prepare. Though they’d appeared opposite each other onscreen before – in 2019’s Godfather of Harlem, with True playing Sandra, a pregnant woman detoxing from heroin – it was the first time they ran through lines together. But she also manifested it. A year before booking the role, True made a vision board. On it, she included a cut-out of Deadline​’s logo placed beneath a photo of Rachel, whose work she admired in Bottoms, the 2023 comedy the actor co-wrote and starred in with The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri (who has a great cameo in I Love LA), and in 2020’s Shiva Baby, the excellent, unsettling feature which put Rachel on the map as a serious comic actress. Then she did a ritual, taking her father’s Emmy for producing the 2002 film Door to Door and placing it under a full moon, before surrounding it with crystals. Very Alani-coded. After that, True waited.

She got the call on a flight, as the plane was in the middle of taxiing down the runway. It was Rachel. True knew her phone was meant to be on flight mode, but she answered anyway. ​“I did not care, I was picking up that fucking call!” she says, laughing. After Rachel gave her the good news, she was crying so hard with joy that the stranger in the next seat extended their congratulations. For Rachel, what made True perfect for the role was her openness. Alani could have easily been a negative cloud on the group, or a role that could readily be misunderstood if played without nuance. ​“But True has this sweetness about her,” Rachel tells me, ​“she adds a depth that makes you root for Alani in an unexpected way.”

On paper, I Love LA is about a group of people that are hard to root for: the selfish career girl, the clout chaser, the influencer, the rich kid. They’re the archetypes people often point to when they say they hate LA. But slowly, perhaps even against your will, they grow on you – Alani especially. She’s the glue of the group, always smoothing things over. She might not have a job, but she’s deeply committed to everyone getting along.

In episode two, there’s a scene where Alani breezes into her dad’s film production office, where she technically holds the honorific of VP of Creative Projects, though the receptionist has clearly never met her. She’s there to pick up a package (new Tabi flats), when she accidentally interrupts a meeting in which executives are developing a Gen‑Z take on Clueless.

Unprompted, Alani starts talking about her life as the execs take notes. She offers up a story about an eighth-grade boyfriend that feels almost charming, until we learn he was 28 to her 13. With a wife. And a kid. And that he took her to Katsuya Brentwood, the celebrity-favoured sushi spot that peaked in the early 2010s.

This is the other thing the show really gets right: its references. From Katsuya and Bar Seco to Canyon Coffee and Din Tai Fung, the show namedrops cultural markers that immediately locate the characters in a very specific LA ecosystem. That attention to detail extends to the show’s most surreal detours, as well. When I ask True what she enjoyed most about shooting, she points to the cast’s willingness to experiment. ​“We’d come to set with so many ideas, just trying things to see how it goes,” she says. For example:

“Shooting that scene with Elijah Wood was so fun. He wasn’t just a vibe — he was so willing to get weird.”

In that scene, Alani and Maia attend a party at Wood’s house. The Lord of the Rings actor plays an OCD-intense version of himself and Alani, who has harboured a years-long crush on him, decides to snoop around. No spoilers, but just as things are on the cusp of heating up – or so Alani thinks – the whole set-up goes haywire, in what turns out to be one of I Love LA​’s best comedic climaxes.

That Alani becomes raw material for a Cher Horowitz-type character feels like a long overdue corrective, too. For decades, the beautiful, rich, ditzy-but-brilliant girl archetype has been almost exclusively reserved for white women – Cher, yes, but also Karen Smith in Mean Girls, Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, even the lacquered heiresses of Gossip Girl’s Upper East Side.

“Alani was a kind of character that dark-skinned Black women don’t really get to play, and someone I could relate to,” True says. And fans have told her so. ​“So many young Black girls, gays and theys with similar cadences tell me they feel so seen by the character.”

This kind of thing is also why she wanted to act in the first place. ​“My dad always told me to figure out why I wanted to do this before anything else,” she says. ​“My reason was always to give voice to characters that don’t already exist.” Like Alani, True doesn’t shy away from where she comes from. ​“Being the daughter of a Black man who has succeeded in a field where he usually wouldn’t, I was happy to play someone who isn’t ashamed of her family and father’s success.”

Born and raised in the Hollywood Hills, True is the youngest of four children. She grew up surrounded by nature, and home felt safe and playful. Her mum Keisha, who passed away in 2023, made sure of that. As True’s biggest fan and hypewoman, ​“she thought I could do literally anything. She was definitely the ​‘they’re just jealous of you!’ type of mom,” she says. ​“I think about what she’d say a lot,” True adds quietly. ​“I just know she’d be so happy for me.”

Now, on the horizon is a coveted role in Matthew Bright’s Spring Breakers: Salvation Mountain, the long-awaited sequel to the 2012 Harmony Korine cult classic, in which True will star alongside Bella Thorne, Ariel Martin and Grace Van Dien. True recalls meeting Bella, the former Disney star turned indie provocateur, at an industry gala, where they instantly clicked. ​“We’re ready,” she says, grinning. ​“I believe in Bella completely and I’m curious to see how Matthew Bright’s vision will bring it together.”

True adores the original Spring Breakers – as do so many who came of age in its glow of neon bikinis and nihilism. She’s painfully aware, then, that expectations are high across the board. ​“I was 14, in my Lana Ultraviolence era, smoking weed out of apples,” True remembers. ​“My jaw was on the floor watching all my Disney icons [turn dark],” she says, referring to a film in which Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens did just that. At the time, it felt like a subversive middle finger to the narrative pop culture often pushes on teen girls – that they ought to be perfectly groomed and behaved. ​“I remember thinking: ​‘We are not good girls anymore!’” As a freshman in college, True even dressed up as a Spring Breaker for Halloween. ​“I posted a picture that my dad immediately texted me to take down.”

Right now, before filming kicks off, her day-to-day is a lot more settled. Winter in New York tends to bring out True’s cosy side. She usually hangs out with friends within a five-block radius of her apartment and watches lots of movies. Lately, she’s been bingeing Modern Family, because it’s ​“easy to nap during and get back into whenever you wake up”.

Still, she often goes home to LA – its pull as a sunny sanctuary, miles away from freezing cold NYC, is too hard to ignore. ​“I love seeing the mountains come into view almost as soon as I land,” True says. ​“Nothing really compares.” The image brings to mind what might be the most LA moment of I Love LA: when Alani and Tallulah decide to ​“act like tourists” and go to the beach on a weekday afternoon. They get high, coast down the Imperial Highway in Alani’s Ford Bronco, stop at Erewhon and end up by the ocean, having the best day imaginable. True’s own preferred order at everyone’s favourite overpriced food shop? ​“A Strawberry Glazed Skin smoothie,” she says. ​“I almost called it the Hailey, but I think her contract is up,” she adds, a perfectly blended True/​Alani aside.

And where does this true LA girl like to go out out when she’s home? She admits she’ll always love a drink at the Chateau Marmont, but she’s hesitant to crown any one spot just yet. ​“I feel like I’m only just entering my Hollywood era,” she says, like she’s testing the phrase out loud, imagining how it might feel one day. Already, there’s a dream role twinkling in the distance: a certain disco queen fans often say she resembles. ​“I guess we kind of do look alike?” True says leadingly, bouncing in her chair, as Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby loops somewhere in the back of both our minds. ​“And I do love Donna so much.” She giggles at the thought, before reining herself in: ​“I don’t think I’m ready yet. But give me some time, universe. This one’s going on the vision board next.”

HAIR Nero at MA+ MAKEUP Michaela Bosch at MA+ CASTING DIRECTOR Simone Schofer at Artlist PRODUCTION The Production Studios EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Jude Spour LOCAL PRODUCER Shay Johnson PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Mike Broussard STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Jackson Prus LOCAL PRODUCTION MANAGER Frankie Lombardo LOCAL PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Cyrenae Tademy