How Natasha Rothwell Wrote Herself Into the Leading Role

An allergy to over-the-counter pain medication changed Natasha Rothwell’s life. Soon after she moved to Los Angeles, in 2015, to write for Issa Rae’s era-defining HBO dramedy Insecure, she had some dental work done and found herself in so much pain that she popped an Advil and crossed her fingers it would be OK. It wasn’t. Realizing that the loud, ragged breathing she was suddenly hearing was her own, she drove herself to Cedars-Sinai in a panic.

The solo hospital trip forced the epiphany that, though rarely alone, she was profoundly lonely. “For the better part of my 20s, I was running around like a heat-seeking missile, trying to find the one, to find that piece to make sense of myself,” Rothwell recalls. “Because being alone was the thing I thought I was afraid of.” In search of love, she’d neglected friendships, family bonds, her relationship with herself. “But in that moment, in Cedars, I was like: ‘Oh no, I'm lonely. It's not that I don't have someone here that I know—it's that I didn't reach out to someone.’”

Almost a decade (and many productive years of therapy) later, Rothwell, who has since appeared in fan-favorite roles in Insecure and The White Lotus, is sipping a colorful iced-tea drink in the verdant lounge of a Manhattan hotel, recounting how that terrifying incident inspired not just a personal reckoning, but also a creative breakthrough. On Sept. 13, Hulu will release the first series created by and starring the writer, actor, producer, and director. How to Die Alone casts Rothwell as Melissa, a self-conscious, self-sabotaging airport worker who has a brush with death during a lonely 35th birthday spent eating takeout and assembling IKEA-like furniture. Her roommate in the hospital, a wise older woman, urges her to “stop caring what other people think and start doing something that scares you.” This advice, coupled with the creeping awareness that she could have died before she’d let her life truly begin, catalyzes Mel’s bumpy transformation from a wallflower into a woman actively pursuing self-love, friendship, financial stability, professional fulfillment, adventure.

“I wanted to have the character have a near-death experience that woke her up to the fact that it's not about romantic partnership—it's about partnership with yourself,” Rothwell says. “If this is the period at the end of the sentence of my life, is it going to be a life that I feel is worth living?” In other words: “Time is precious.” By turns funny, dark, and inspirational in a way that feels hard-earned and genuine rather than glib or saccharine, Alone is a show about seizing the moment that could only have come from Rothwell’s scrupulous examination of her own life.

Among the famous faces of Hollywood, there are those who have never had to eke out a civilian living: nepo babies, child stars, actors who got a big break straight out of Juilliard. And then there are those who have a whole, regular adult existence behind them. That Rothwell, 43, belongs to the latter category is evident in the dignity she brings to characters living relatively unglamorous lives as well as in her groundedness and perspective. Blessed with the kind of multi-hyphenate talent that can transform a breakthrough gig into a sustainable career, she also has a capacity for hard work, which has been key to her incremental rise.

Growing up with a father in the Air Force, Rothwell always felt that she was meant to be an artist and seized the opportunity to perform a new persona every few years, when the military relocated her family and she and her three siblings started over in a new school. “Who do I want to be?” she would ask herself. “You know what? I’m gonna have a rattail.” At Ithaca College, she switched from a journalism major, partially inspired by Oprah, to pursue her true love, theater. Eventually, she moved to New York.

“I was like a weird superhero,” she jokes. “I was a theater teacher by day and then I was doing comedy at night,” notably with Upright Citizens Brigade. The balancing act taught her to “hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. That’s such an ingrained mindset. So it’s hard for me to slow down and take in the fruits of my labor.” At the time, it was also tough for Rothwell to translate her onstage triumphs into confidence in her personal life. “I felt like Clark Kent when I got off-stage,” she recalls. The question was: “How do I be Superman in real life?”

As she worked to answer it, success came bit by bit. In 2014, she was hired as a writer on SNL. It wasn’t the most supportive environment; she has said that, as a Black woman, she worried about being seen as a diversity hire and would literally raise her hand to be heard. Insecure, a show about the friendships and love lives of young, professional Black women in L.A., was different. It functioned as a launching pad for Black talent, and no one benefited from Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny’s shrewd eyes more than Rothwell. When her informal readings of boisterous wildcard Kelli Prenny’s lines cracked everyone up in the writers’ room, they offered her the part. The character turned out to be more than just comic relief. “Brown-woman roles, especially when they’re supporting, can be broad,” Rothwell notes. “So being able to have her be funny, hypersexual, love her body, love her friends, fiercely loyal, emotional—all those things excited me.” Kelli’s one-liners induced spit takes, but Rothwell’s vulnerability when, for example, her character feels abandoned by a best friend preparing to have a baby made her relatable and real.

By the summer of 2021, viewers could watch her as both the most offbeat member of Insecure’s core friend group and as the most down-to-earth character in another HBO series: The White Lotus, auteur and actor Mike White’s surprise-hit, satirical murder mystery about rich people behaving badly at a luxury resort. A gentle spa manager paid (insufficiently) to pamper ungrateful guests, Rothwell's Belinda Lindsey bonds with Jennifer Coolidge’s lost-soul heiress, Tanya McQuoid, and, despite her doubts, allows herself to trust Tanya’s offer to fund her dream wellness venture. As the rules of White’s class-conscious universe dictate, the partnership is doomed. Viewers couldn’t help but feel for Belinda, who gives so much more to others than she gets in return. Yet Rothwell was caught off-guard by the outpouring of love. “I didn’t think she would be seen,” she says, because service workers tend to be as overlooked in fiction about the 1% as they are in life. “So it was beautiful to see audiences see her and see that she had a silent struggle.”

Now, fresh off shooting the upcoming third season of Lotus—an anthology series in which Belinda will be the rare character to appear twice—in Thailand, Rothwell is moved to see audiences see her, writing to say they're the Kelli of their group or cheering the announcement of Alone on social media. “I don’t have main character energy in life,” she says. That rings true; though a charming, engaged conversationalist, she isn't the type to guzzle attention. “I'm in the stands with the foam finger, like: ‘Let's go!’ So to receive that support has been very moving. When I posted the art for [Alone] and the messages came in, I was reduced to tears: ‘Oh, wow. I'm on the field now, and they're in the stands.’”

A long-gestating project that Rothwell created under the mantle of her production company, Big Hattie, How to Die Alone required her to become a different sort of superhero—the kind whose superpower is being in a dozen places at once, collaborating with castmates, conferring with the crew, overseeing episode edits, and making endless decisions, all while giving a funny, poignant lead performance. “I felt like Simone Biles,” she recalls. “I was flexible, I could do it all.” In retrospect, she suspects she found “this reservoir of energy” because she was finally telling the story she’d dreamed about for years: “I was the most present that I think I’ve ever been on set.”

It helped to have role models and resources in two of TV’s most influential creator-performers, Rae and White (who has yet to appear in Lotus but who previously starred alongside his co-creator, Laura Dern, in the cult-classic HBO dramedy Enlightened). “Something that is unique to both of them is that they are unapologetically themselves,” Rothwell observes. “They fiercely protect their work, and they aren’t afraid of telling unique, interesting stories, because they believe in them.”

Rothwell resolved to bring the same confidence to Alone. In conceiving the show, that meant trusting the wisdom she had acquired over years of working to fuse her inner Clark Kent and Superman, and to honor the vulnerability that transformation demanded. “I wanted a show that speaks to what it means to activate and be in the fray of living,” she says. “I didn’t want it couched as a before-and-after story. Let’s get messy. Let’s be in that muck together.”

Melissa’s decision to take control of her life doesn’t make everything fall into place; it’s only the beginning of a path strewn with obstacles. “I’m really trying to change,” she laments, midway through the season. “But it’s like I’m hitting wall after wall after wall.” Among Alone’s most profound insights is that working on yourself means auditing every relationship. Mel has to confront a seemingly perfect brother (South Side and Sherman’s Showcase co-creator Bashir Salahuddin) who criticizes her choices while making some pretty poor ones of his own. And it slowly dawns on her that her best friend and co-worker Rory (Conrad Ricamora) is taking her for granted. This particular subplot is “about when you grow and outpace someone else’s growth,” Rothwell says.

The show’s setting is laden with its own subtext. She felt strongly about looking past the first-class passengers whose first-class problems TV loves to dissect in order to zoom in on working-class airport employees whose journeys may be more metaphorical than physical. “I have always been drawn to the characters we marginalize,” she says. When we center their daily struggles, flirtations, ambitions, and inside jokes, as individuals and as a workplace community, “we consider that they’re more than one-dimensional people in our lives that help us get on a plane.”

Rothwell took a similarly humane approach to ensuring that her cast and crew were comfortable on set—“not just in talking to me, but in being able to be themselves fully and not feel like someone’s going to say something that’s going to trigger them and give them a sh-t day,” she explains. To that end, she made a rule consistent with Alone’s insistence that its self-identified fat, Black, female protagonist is worthy of love, respect, and success: “I was like: ‘We’re not going to use the word fat pejoratively anywhere on set. You can’t eat a meal and say, ‘Oh my God, I feel so fat.’” As you might imagine, in Ozempic-era Hollywood, this kind of talk can be an occupational hazard.

It all ties back to the experiment at the core of Alone: “Let’s see what happens when someone goes on that journey to figure out how to love themselves enough to stop hurting themselves.” For Rothwell, who is several years farther down that road than Mel, making progress has meant seizing opportunities she never would’ve thought possible as a theater major who just wanted some part, any part in some play, any play. This openness led her to a scene-stealing role in last year’s big-budget franchise musical Wonka, and makes her want to keep expanding her repertoire. "I want to do it all," she says. For example? “Dead-ass: an action hero.” Also: “A horror story. I would kill to be in Misery. Give me that opportunity to be the villain.”

For now, though, she’s focused on the projects she already has lined up, especially given the imminent threat to shows by and about women of color posed by the streaming contraction and the risk aversion of a post-strike Hollywood. In early September, the news broke that she was developing and slated to star in an adaptation of "Who TF Did I Marry?," the viral series of TikTok videos by Tareasa 'Reesa Teesa' Johnson. “Coming out of the strike, there was a real fear: Will my show fall prey to that unconscious bias that seems to be expressing itself by having so many amazing shows go away?” Rothwell recalls. “That’s why I want to be present in this moment, because you just never know when something is going to go away.”