While HBO’s I Love LA has been praised for its cocaine-fueled and roofie joke-laced brand of comedic chaos, one of the pilot’s standout quips is also among its most low-key ad libs. Moments after Maia (Rachel Sennott, the show’s creator) begs her boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), not to let an earthquake interrupt their birthday sex — “If we’re gonna die, I just wanna come!” she cries — she starts lamenting how much older she looks now that she’s turned 27. “You’re skinnier now,” Dylan replies dryly. Then, he waits a beat before dropping the punchline Hutcherson improvised mid-take: “Which I know you love!”
The way Hutcherson sees it, it’s this kind of tiny-but-telling aside that reveals who Dylan really is and what his relationship with Maia is actually like: something far more layered than just being the nice, normie Spanish teacher to her high-strung influencer manager. “When I was reading the scripts and talking with Rachel about it, [I said], ‘I don’t know why Dylan is with Maia. We have to figure out what that is [because] there’s a version of Dylan that’s very judgy of her,” the actor tells me over a bacon-heavy breakfast at Nine Orchard, the Lower East Side hotel he’s staying at for the week. The version that interested him most was a Dylan who isn’t totally comfortable complimenting Maia for being thinner, yet will still do it because he knows it’s exactly what she wants to hear. “What I wanted to bring to Dylan is that he finds her existence attractive: her wackiness, her spinning, chaotic mind.”
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Source: Bustle