The 28-year-old director Emma Seligman first met Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, the stars of their second feature film, Bottoms, a comedy about a high-school queer-female fight club, when they were all college students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Seligman was at Salon Series, a collaborative space where Tisch students perform for their peers, when they watched Edebiri (who now stars in The Bear) crack a joke about the actress Maggie Smith. No one got the joke, except for Seligman. At the time, they had a vague idea for the main character of Bottoms: an awkward, adorable, and slapstick-funny girl. “I remember thinking, If I ever make that movie, [Edebiri] should be her,” says Seligman.
