I outlived her!” says Natasha Rothwell, with a magnificent cackle. “I outlived the bitch!” The star of The White Lotus is rejoicing in the knowledge that, three seasons into HBO’s hit eat-the-rich satire, her sweet spa manager Belinda, lives on, while the woman who shattered her dreams, Jennifer Coolidge’s indelibly camp billionaire Tanya, is, well… dead.
A quick recap for those with hazy memories of the sun-soaked show: in season one, set at the lavish White Lotus resort in Hawaii, Tanya brutally dropped Belinda after promising to finance her hopes of opening her own spa. Then, in season two, at the hotel’s Sicilian outpost, Tanya fell to her death from a superyacht. The two incidents were unrelated but, you know, karma. Now, as the drama returns for its third run, Belinda is visiting the White Lotus in Thailand, where she’s taking wellness training – and no, she’s not forgiven Tanya. “I mean, how can she?” asks Rothwell, who has now composed herself. “She was hurt so profoundly.” But the actor will, of course, miss having Coolidge as one of the funniest scene partners of her career. “Jennifer had me biting the inside of my cheek,” she says, remembering how hard it was to stop herself from bursting out laughing mid-scene.
The return of The White Lotus is one of the most keenly anticipated TV events of the year. Mike White’s mordant study of luxury resorts is a world where privilege, customer service and, in this show, death collide. It ticks every box for the winter TV schedule. Gorgeous escapism? Oh yes. Obnoxious characters we love to hate? Oodles of them. A compelling central mystery? You bet.
The show has mopped up 15 Emmys over its first two seasons, and given us unforgettable performances from stars such as Coolidge, Will Sharpe and Murray Bartlett. Yet among all these infinity pool dwellers, Rothwell has made a splash. And news that she was coming back to the show, which refreshes most of its cast each season, has been met with huge excitement.
In her Emmy-nominated season one performance as Belinda, Rothwell excelled at presenting a veneer of sweetness and professionalism that hid an inner sense of dejection and growing resentment. With her sad smiles and patient breaths, she was heart-piercing as a woman ground down by years of doting on rich white people in the service industry, desperate for her big break. “Belinda was like a shaking can of soda, and at any moment could have popped,” says Rothwell.
I meet the 44-year-old in a London hotel, and she is unlike Belinda in almost every way. Wearing a playful frock with an oversized collar and pussy bow, she is straight-talking and quick to laughter. She seems totally unselfconscious. Yet she hasn’t always been this way, she admits. “Playing Belinda reminds me of my early days, of performing for other people, and sacrificing my opinions because I didn’t want to rock the boat. Like, God forbid I would advocate for myself, because other people’s needs are more important than mine!”
She jokes that, as a “recovering people pleaser”, stepping back into Belinda’s sandals was “re-traumatising”. “I was like, oh, I remember what this is like, just having to bite my tongue and swallow blood and not stand up for myself.” But, she promises, we’ll see Belinda holding her ground more in season three. “Like most people on vacation, she gets to audition a version of herself, and she’s auditioning some courage.”
Apart from that, Rothwell can’t reveal much else, except that this season will have a focus on Eastern religion and spirituality, exploring the way it’s fetishised and commodified in the West. Rothwell, who was born in Wichita, Kansas, but now lives in Los Angeles, has seen this first hand. “In LA, how close you can get to your best self is equal to how many crystals you have or silent retreats you go on,” she says, eyes rolling. “And there’s a lot of co-opting of culture that happens, where you feel like, ‘Oh, I’m using the good parts of this, but ignoring the generational trauma that resulted in it.’ And I think this season makes us question our motives for travelling to certain countries. Are you taking more than you’re giving? Are you there to experience it or post about it on Instagram?”
Rothwell is a keen traveller herself. Growing up, her family were constantly on the move, given her dad’s job in the US Air Force. She has previously joked that, because she got her period in Maryland, in some ways that state feels like home. But Philadelphia was really the anchor for her and her two siblings. “I moved around a ton, and that spirit of travel stayed with me,” she says. “I lived in Tokyo for a year and have always loved to travel abroad solo.”
I really do love surprising people with my tenacity, and I have a thick skin. When I believe in something, I f***ing fight for it
Another theme that’s been knotted through White’s show, right from the start, is inequality. Belinda bridges the realms of upstairs and downstairs in this season, in her role as both a visitor and a trainee. “Belinda is flirting with the other side,” says Rothwell. She points to a moment in episode one where Belinda waves at an affluent Black couple – she doesn’t know them but is pleasantly surprised to see them as guests at the hotel. White wrote this scene into the show after Rothwell told him about her experience of bumping into Black tourists on a trip to Ireland, where she had hardly seen any people who shared her skin colour. “I’m there, on top of this beautiful green hill, and there’s mist everywhere and not another Black person in sight,” she says. “And very cinematically, this Black family emerges from the mist, and we lock eyes, and I go up to them and I literally hug everyone in their family without even speaking. And they hug back.”
In The White Lotus, having Black guests stay at the hotel makes that kind of lifestyle “feel aspirational and attainable”, says Rothwell. “That’s why representation is so important,” she says. “The first time I saw a Black person in first class on the plane, I remember clocking it and being like, oh right, yeah, that’s for us too. For Belinda, seeing this couple move with grace and ease in a space that gives her so much anxiety is like, OK, exhale, you’re here.”
Rothwell knows that feeling: the relief of finally belonging, very well. She felt it deeply when she joined Issa Rae’s comedy-drama Insecure, in 2016. Rothwell’s arrival on Insecure, which centred on the friendship of two awkward, modern-day Black women, came straight after her tenure on Saturday Night Live, a show dominated by white guys. SNL had been Rothwell’s first-ever TV writing gig following years of working the comedy scene in New York; she left after just one season because she didn’t feel at home.
Being part of a Black-led project after SNL, then, was a “culture shock in the best way”. While SNL fostered a “culture of deference, like, ‘Am I allowed to speak? Is this my place?’” and had, she says, “a tangible hierarchy”, Insecure was completely different. On her first day on Rae’s show, Rothwell raised her hand to speak, and was told in no uncertain terms by the team: “You’re here because your voice matters.” At the end of the day, she got into her car outside the HBO studios and wept. “It was just such a trauma response to not being allowed to speak [before], and I felt so grateful to Issa.”
Rothwell was the first writer hired on Insecure, which ran from 2016 to 2021, and she was later cast as spunky sidekick Kelli – whom The Guardian called 2018’s funniest character – after a table read during the show’s first season. Bosses at HBO were so impressed with what she’d done with Kelli that they gave her a development deal for her very own show. Eight years later, in 2024, she released How to Die Alone, in which she finally got to be a series lead, playing Mel, an electric cart driver at JFK airport who’s having an existential crisis. The show is a riot and shows off Rothwell’s aptitude for bombastic physical comedy – in the first few minutes alone, we see her being rugby-tackled to the floor by a security guard.
Farce aside, How to Die Alone has a pulsing heart under the surface. Rothwell has previously said she feels that, as a plus-size Black woman, “the world is screaming at me constantly that I don’t belong or that I’m too much, and so it would be impossible for that not to seep in”. She wanted to make a show about that feeling. It’s about a woman learning to love herself.
“So many women are sending me the most moving DMs about feeling seen,” says Rothwell now. “I’m 20 years into therapy and there’s a lot of up and back, growth is nonlinear, and I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of someone who looks like me. Often [Black] characters can be rote, and just expected, so it was a beautiful opportunity to give a neurotic storyline to a protagonist that wouldn’t ordinarily get to explore those themes.”
Rothwell came up against a lot of brick walls in getting How to Die Alone to the screen. While the journey started at HBO, the show ended up finding a home at Hulu, and it was made by Rothwell’s own Big Hattie Productions, named after Hattie McDaniel, the first Black person to win an Oscar. “There’s a saying in Black culture that you have to work twice as hard for half as much,” she says. “And it shouldn’t have taken, I think, that long to make. It was an eight-year process, and there are a lot of systemic reasons as to why that is.” She sighs. “It’s a bet for a lot of these studios to support and uplift and fund a show that’s being led by a Black person. But I wouldn’t have got this far in my career if I didn’t take ‘no’ as a light suggestion.” She smiles, eyebrow arched. “So I kept pushing. I really do love surprising people with my tenacity, and I have a thick skin. When I believe in something, I f***ing fight for it.”
On day one, before production kicked off, Rothwell made an announcement to all cast and crew. She had one key rule for everyone on set: the word “fat” would not be used pejoratively. “I told them, ‘If you’ve eaten too much after lunch, then saying, “Ugh, I feel so fat,” is an example of that. That means that someone else who is fat feels like they are disgusting because you just made that sound and noise in relation to the word.’”
Rothwell says that, in the past, she “perpetrated the biggest crimes with that word”. “I was always self-deprecating in school – I made myself the butt of the joke. I’ve moved through the world as a plus-size woman my whole life and, thank God for therapy, I’ve learned to understand that I get to love this big, beautiful body, and I need to let go of feeling like that word is a bad thing.” With How to Die Alone, she was able to create something “where someone who looks like me is desirable”. She laughs. "And I have two very beautiful men vying for my attention on the show!”
When we speak, Rothwell is hoping her comedy will be renewed for a second season, and celebrating its Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) nomination for Outstanding New Series, announced that morning. But sadly, a week later, news breaks that How to Die Alone has been cancelled. Rothwell makes a statement saying she is “shocked, heartbroken and frankly, baffled”, and vows to find her show a new home.
I’m certain she will put up a strong fight, but she will be busy, regardless – next on the agenda is a TV adaptation of the viral TikTok video series Who TF Did I Marry?; Rothwell is both developing the series and has top billing.
For now, though, her sights are set on returning to LA, which is starting to rebuild after some of the worst wildfires California has ever seen.
“I’m grateful that I’m safe and sound,” she says, “and, short of air quality and ash raining from the sky, there’s a sadness that’s a cloud over the city right now. It’s so hard to see the city hurting, but I’m excited for us to get back to some semblance of normal.” She gives a teary smile. “Hollywood loves a comeback story.”
‘The White Lotus’ season three airs on Sky Atlantic and NOW on 17 February
