Natasha Rothwell’s life would be unrecognizable, compared to what we know of her today, if she hadn’t stopped still at a crossroads and changed her chosen path to the one that led her to create, produce and star in “How to Die Alone.” The proverbial fork in the road was located centerstage at Ithaca College, where she majored in journalism.
Rothwell made that choice out of practicality, she told me. “I had created, I think, some after-school special type drama in my head that my parents would be disappointed if I majored in theater,” Rothwell remembered during our recent conversation over Zoom. “Never did they ever have a conversation with me about it, but I had just taken into account the sacrifices they made for me, and it was going to be a massive swing, and with no guarantee.”
This ignored that she chose Ithaca for its respected theater program. But two events made her pivot inevitable. One was that she did a production of Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which reawakened the pull theater had on her spirit.
The other had a more potent pull because she was in the audience, watching her former castmates perform “House of the Blue Leaves.”
“I'll never forget it, watching those girls who I’d just done ‘For Colored Girls’ with, but they're continuing on with their acting program, so they're in this production, and I'm not,” she said.
Then she opened the playbill to find Langston Hughes’ “Harlem (A Dream Deferred)” displayed inside, with its plaintive opening lines:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
“Before the curtain even rose for the production, I sobbed,” she said. “And I remember going back to my dorm that night and making the decision that, ‘I don't want to be watching theater. I want to be doing it.’”
The next day she returned to the theater while it was dark, “because I had access and knew how to get in,” she said. “And I just stood on stage — very dramatic of me, I know — I stood on stage, and I just, like, nodded. I was like –” she extended her hands in front of her – "'this is what I want, this POV of a theater. I don't want –'" she gestured to an imaginary space offstage — “'that POV of a theater.' And that sealed the deal.”
In watching “How to Die Alone,” you can see flicks of those scenes within the personality of Rothwell’s main character Mel, a J.F.K. employee reminded every day, quite literally, of her failure to launch. Mel’s ebullient personality lifts people’s spirits as she drives between gates and terminals, and her vast trove of knowledge about the world places them at ease in the moments before they board their planes. Mel’s also broke, has an aversion to commitment, and in a relatable and metaphorical twist, is gripped by aerophobia.
In the first episode, a shelving unit falls on top of Mel while she's alone in her apartment on her birthday, digging into a sad meal of room-temperature crab rangoon. Upon waking up in the hospital, she’s informed that she was dead for three minutes; worse, she’s chastised for not having any emergency contacts. Everything that follows that turning point shows Mel steadily learning to embrace life, including making plenty of mistakes, one of which catches up to her in the finale.
Now that all eight episodes are streaming on Hulu, people can watch “How to Die Alone” as I believe it was meant to be consumed: as a breezy feel-good binge you can blaze through from start to finish. Its first four episodes debuted earlier this month to favorable reviews, and in early 2025 she returns to “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s critically acclaimed anthology series in which she played, with a palpable sense of knowing, the luxury resort’s spa manager Belinda.
Much-loved as Belinda is, “Insecure" broadly announced her as a comedic force in front of the camera. Her audition for that comedy's breakout character, Kelli, began in the show’s writers’ room; she was the first scribe to be hired. Rothwell’s hilarious line reads for the character were unmatched, so when it came time to officially cast Kelli, “Insecure” creator Issa Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny already considered the job to be hers.
That level of respect for her abilities was the opposite of what she experienced during her stint as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” where she worked for a season only to have her contract not be renewed.
Today, Rothwell likens being dropped by Lorne Michaels to “having a crush on a guy for a long time, knowing he doesn't date Black women. Then he takes you out, and he dates you seriously for a year. And you're thinking, ‘This feels good!’ Then he breaks up with you, and you're like, ‘I didn't have you on my radar anyway.’ Do you know what I mean?”
“I was upset because I wanted to get good at it. I'm a perfectionist,” she continued. “But it was also comical. Since Ellen Cleghorn, I had not seen myself on the show in any capacity, so it was never on my vision board or to-do list in order to get to where I wanted to be in my career.”
That chapter played its part in Rothwell’s creative gestation process that gave form and shape to her show’s lead character. But Mel was also born out of necessity, Rothwell said, “because the industry is very binary in their thinking. It's comedy or drama. Which camp are you in?”
“Insecure” showcased her comedy chops — “Which I love,” she interjected, adding, “Dance with the one that brung you!" — but it wasn't until her scene-stealing turn in "White Lotus" that casting directors noticed her dramatic range as well.
"I wanted a character that was not going to be pigeonholed by preconceived notions about what I can or cannot do," she said. Instead of waiting for that part to come to her, she created one for herself and ended up hiring Cleghorn to play her mother on her show.
Rothwell remembers that when she first moved to New York, “I was just probably the most inauthentic version of myself: I was people pleasing. I was a boundaryless wonder, I was a needless wonder, and I was waiting for life to start because I was waiting for a romantic partner.”
She credits therapy, lots of it, for inspiring the plot that led to “How to Die Alone,” referring to it many times as “a love letter to the unhealed version of myself.”
“There was a lot of discrepancy between how I was living and the life I wanted to lead, so this show comes from me reconciling those two things,” she said. “It wasn’t easy, it was messy: you don't graduate from therapy with a degree. You just make the same mistakes over again. But you make them better, and you figure it out sooner. And I wanted to write a show that spoke to that, because I didn't give myself a lot of grace in that process.”
That’s a challenge Mel is saddled with at the end of Season 1, which culminates in her ex’s destination wedding and her choice of whether to attend. This isn’t blowing any surprise since that question hangs over Mel throughout the season while inspiring her to examine all the other parts of her life where she’s held herself back.
The show’s title isn’t an admonishment about being single but, instead, an invitation to expand one’s horizons, find your true self, and as Rothwell mentions, give that person much more grace than we’re inclined to do.
Along with that, Rothwell hopes “How to Die Alone” encourages people not to isolate, and especially to talk about loneliness more openly. “I feel like, after quarantine, we still have not collectively grieved what that was to humanity. Talking about it is kind of the antidote,” she said. “And so I just really hope people watch the show, feel inspired to connect in that way. And, yeah, feel a little less lonely at the end of the day.”
All episodes of "How to Die Alone" are streaming on Hulu.
