'The White Lotus' Star Natasha Rothwell on Hulu's 'How to Die Alone'

Natasha Rothwell’s first therapy session more than 20 years ago planted the seed for the creator, executive producer and star’s new show How to Die Alone , out on Hulu on Friday, Sept. 13.

“It was sort of hand in hand with my personal self-help journey,” Rothwell tells Los Angeles . “The process of putting myself out there and allowing myself to be seen and accepting myself in terms of body image and not caring what people think — these were all things that I was going through. So when presented with an opportunity to do my own show, it felt like a natural extension of that work.”

The two-time Emmy nominee, who served as a producer, writer and actress on HBO’s Insecure and stole the show as spa manager on The White Lotus , is developing new TV projects as part of an overall deal with ABC Signature.

In How to Die Alone , Rothwell plays Melissa, a hapless airport employee at JFK who’s having the worst day of her life — which happens to coincide with her 35th birthday. What starts with a wedding invitation from her ex-boyfriend ends with a near-death experience alone in her apartment (the perils of assembling flat-pack furniture by yourself) — and leads to the wake-up call Mel needs to start living her life for herself. Equal parts absurdity and earnestness drive the setup, with wise words from Mel’s hospital roommate, who advises her that the worst kind of death is “when you stop caring for yourself.”

“It’s a love letter to my time in New York in my 20s,” she says, when “I was trying to figure out that if my journey was not to be in partnership with a man that I loved and who loved me, I would have to do the hard work of loving myself.”

Rothwell feels the theme may resonate with people who are coupled or not, noting that after she screened the pilot at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, a woman came up to tell her that the episode hit close to home.

As an actor, Rothwell engages the audience through performances that punctuate sincerity with comedic timing. There’s Kelli, the affable friend to Issa Rae’s Issa Dee in Insecure , which earned Rothwell an NAACP Image Award and generated a much-shared GIF of the character pantomiming “growth” with her fingers subtly traveling upward to a wide-eyed explosion.

Then there’s her Emmy-nominated portrayal of Belinda Lindsey — a spa manager whose calm demeanor belies the disdain roiling beneath the surface — in the first season of The White Lotus , a role Rothwell is reprising for Season 3.

She recently shot the newest batch of episodes in Thailand and has yet to process the experience. Rothwell is, however, enthusiastic about returning to the role that White Lotus creator Mike White hand-picked her to play back in 2020.

“I went to school for theater, but Hollywood can be kind of particular about how they’re willing to view people, and they really wanted me in a specific box after Insecure ,” Rothwell says. “I’m grateful to Mike for seeing Belinda in me. It was an aha moment to a lot of decision makers that, ‘Oh, she does more than just one thing.’”

To Rothwell, her turns as Kelli and Belinda represent small facets of who she is. With How to Die Alone , Rothwell is ready to bring her full self to the screen. Or, as she puts it, a “less-healed version” of who she’s become.

“Most actors will tell you that there’s bits of them in everything they do,” she says. “For me and Melissa, there’s a lot more overlap.”