If you watched her as Kelly on Insecure or Belinda on The White Lotus and thought, I need more Natasha Rothwell, consider her new Hulu show, How to Die Alone, a collective manifestation.
“I put ‘number one on a call sheet’ on two vision boards,” Rothwell tells me. “I’d never been number one on a call sheet. And here I am talking to you about my brand-new show where I’m number one on the call sheet!”
It’s a project almost a decade in the making. In addition to creating, producing, and starring in the half-hour comedy, Rothwell co-showruns the series with Vera Santamaria (Orange Is the New Black, BoJack Horseman). Though she claims not to have main-character energy in real life, Rothwell is magnetic as Mel, a 30-something airport employee jolted out of her millennial ennui by a near-death experience. The show explores themes of loneliness, friendship, and fear with a dash of magical realism and a compelling love triangle. One thing Rothwell learned from Issa Rae? “Cast fine-ass men.”
Vogue caught up with the star as she prepares for the show’s September 13 premiere.
Vogue: Congrats on How to Die Alone. This show has been eight years in the making, right?
Natasha Rothwell: Yes. On Insecure year one, HBO loved what I did with my character Kelly and knew that I was also a writer, so they gave me a development deal for a show. Coming out of the world of improv, it’s “follow the fear,” and the thing that scared me the most was dying alone. I grew up on rom-coms and Disney and this idea that a man on a white horse was going to come and make sense of this mess. But I got into therapy in my early 20s, and realized that the love story I’d been chasing was external, and I wanted to write a show about the internal love story—what happens when the princess saves herself. The show explores the difference between being lonely and being alone, because I was vilifying the solitude when I should have been vilifying the fact that I wasn’t open to the love in my life—platonic, familial, or romantic.
You’ve described your character, Mel, as a love letter to the unhealed parts of you. In the first episode, she gets a wake-up call that changes the course of her life. Did you have a similar moment that caused you to reevaluate everything?
Some wake-up calls are louder than others. There was a woman that I used to do improv with back in New York, and she was young. She was diagnosed with a pretty aggressive cancer and died within the year. I wasn’t super close to her, but I was shocked that someone as young as she was had life taken away from her so quickly. And the way that provoked me at the time was that I had a bunch of unsent emails in my Gmail to guys I had massive crushes on that I was afraid to say anything to. I’d often draft my life, if that makes sense. I had so many things saved in my draft folder because I was too afraid to say them, like an angry email that I just didn’t want to press send on because it would’ve caused trouble. I was conflict-avoidant. It seems so innocuous, but I was so radicalized by having lost someone in the community that I was just like, I don’t want to have things go unsaid. So I went and just pressed send on all of these emails. It was an “aha” moment where I was like, Oh, okay, this is what living is. Fuck the consequences. I want to be able to learn from a mistake. It was exhilarating, and it was just email.
Wow. Were you able to bring that honesty offline and into the real world?
Absolutely. I think loss is a catalyst for us to make the most of the time we have. I was such a people-pleaser. I’d go to dinner and if people said they wanted Italian and I really wanted Chinese, I’d have Italian. Those are such small things, but that version of myself was just so scared to have needs. I didn’t want to bother people with my existence. And that one moment of pressing send on all the unsent emails allowed me to realize that I can close the distance between who I am and who I want to be with a click.
Mel drives a transportation cart at JFK Airport. New York City is known for being hierarchical when it comes to jobs, and you’re centering characters who, in real life, are often invisible to others.
That’s a huge part of why I love this project, and it’s what I focus on with my production company [Big Hattie Productions]. Having spent eight years in New York myself, the hierarchy there is real. It’s a very interesting place to explore your relationship to status and what other people think of you. That’s why it was so important for me not to make Mel or any of the characters on the show be unhappy with their jobs. I didn’t want this to be: Mel is at a dead-end job and she’s unhappy and she’s going to go off to be a museum curator. She loves her job, she’s good at her job. I wanted to not cast aspersions on the people that make our lives work by saying that they’re not ambitious, or that they’re in those positions because they’re not dreamers. Their work is worthy and it’s enough. Mel and her cart—she’s currency. Everyone in the airport, from the Fortune 500 CEO to Nana who’s visiting her son in Chicago, they all want to get on that cart. But Mel’s the one who gets to pick and choose, so there’s a power in that. It was a really fun world to explore.
The show deals with many layered dynamics between friends and siblings. Episode 5 was a standout for me, especially the final scene between you and Bashir Salahuddin, who plays your brother, Brian.
It was an amazing entry point into deepening our relationship to Mel by understanding her family. We always referred to act three of that episode as a one-act play. It was just going to be me and Brian. We really had to get the studio on board, because I was kind of adamant. He comes from the theater, I come from the theater. I wanted these characters to have room to breathe. And I have three siblings. It’s crazy to get to know them as adults, realizing that they’re not the same 15-year-old older sister that was annoying you. She’s married with two kids and has a mortgage, and I have to allow her to be someone other than my memory of her. So I loved the opportunity to explore that idea with the character of Brian. That’s one of my favorite episodes. I mean, all of them are my favorite!
Mel is full of contradictions. She works at an airport but is afraid to fly. She has a lot of love in her life but she can’t say “I love you.” There’s a pivotal scene that really got me, where Mel is tested with whether or not she can say those words to a love interest.
I’d been in that position before where it’s like, How in the world can I say it to you if I can’t even say it to myself? And that ultimately was what we came to in the writers’ room—you have someone that wants to love but doesn’t know what it looks like, or how to do it, because she’s never loved herself and never allowed herself to take that risk. That was a hard scene to shoot, and we shot it in one take. That was all Tiffany Johnson, the director. It was so painful to relive that moment in my life where I was presented with love and I couldn’t say it because I had never felt it for myself. And I feel really grateful for the show, because as much work as we do on ourselves, when you’re writing a version of yourself, it clears up cobwebs that might still be lingering.
I can imagine that experience being cathartic and confronting, and on top of that, you’re running the show, producing, writing, and wearing every hat. How was that experience?
It was a lot, but it was one of those things where I felt so prepared. I was able to have a front-row seat on Insecure to Issa’s journey. I had surreptitiously been taking notes for five seasons. I was a high school teacher for four years, so I know how to rally the troops and get them excited about a project. I don’t have main-character energy in my real life, but I was like, I can do this, I can stand on that experience. And I loved it. It was exhausting, but every time I would get tired, I would get this supernatural kind of energy, this gift of extra battery power. It felt like the universe was providing what I needed in real time. That’s the only way I can describe it. I could get emotional now thinking about it, because so often I have tried to make myself smaller to fit into spaces, and that was exhausting. The biggest gift was not being apologetic about my presence on set. There was something about being able to exhale and be like, I belong here.
Let’s pivot to another show you’re a part of—The White Lotus. You’re coming back for Season 3 and reprising your role as Belinda. Anything you can tell us?
I’m feeling over-the-moon about it. I was in Thailand [filming] for about five months. I never thought I’d be able to put Belinda on again. And I don’t think any of us knew after Season 1 what would be in store for us. Mike White is such an amazing creator and storyteller. I trust him implicitly. Not dissimilar to Mel’s character, Belinda is on the sidelines. For audiences to see more of her story is really what excited me. And it didn’t disappoint. It is epic. When I read the scripts, I was shook. Season 3 is bigger, better, crazier, but still has the hallmark of excellent storytelling. [White] is so good at playing nuance, and I’m just really excited for audiences to see this brand-new world, but also to get to know Belinda a little better.
Can’t wait. OK, back to How to Die Alone. How do you want people to feel when they watch it?
I want people to see themselves in Mel and feel like they have someone to root for. I want it to be the antidote to loneliness, because I hope it creates conversation around the topic. Having created the show has allowed my life to be richer and have more depth and breadth, because when people see me, they know they can have that conversation. I may have just met you, but I’m going to cry on the Zoom, you know what I mean? I hope it makes people feel less alone. And in rooting for someone who’s trying to grow, I hope it gives them permission to try and grow. That’s the best thing that we can do. I didn’t want to present solutions to the world. I wanted to present the opportunity for conversation.
How are you going to celebrate when the show comes out on September 13?
I’ve contemplated getting a tattoo. I’m the type of person that, well, I have anxiety. That’s just a fact. An expression of that is that it’s hard for me to celebrate the good things, because it’s a vulnerability, right? To be happy. It’s like, Oh, this could go away at any minute. It’s almost an act of self-preservation, not to get too excited. At every point in this process I’ve tried to make a concerted effort to celebrate, like when we got the green light, when we wrapped production, all of these benchmarks, and now the ultimate benchmark is happening. The thing that I’ve been working on for eight years is going to see the light of day. My way of celebrating will be to be absolutely present, not thinking about the reviews, not thinking about what comes next, but to be in this moment and to really be proud of myself. That’s the main celebration. And then maybe some ink.
This interview has been edited and condensed.