In 2015, Natasha Rothwell took a trip to Ireland. “I was at some castle on some foggy hill,” she says. “There was not another Black person in sight. And then this Black family kind of emerges from the mist. A mom, dad, and two kids. I see them, we lock eyes, and I just walk up and hug them without speaking.”
A version of her experience made the final cut of the first episode of HBO’s new season of The White Lotus, in which Rothwell reprises her Emmy-nominated role as Belinda, the spa manager who patiently endures Jennifer Coolidge’s needy antics on season one. Belinda travels to the titular resort in Thailand to participate in a wellness-training program. Dazed from her first day “cosplaying as a guest,” in Rothwell’s words, Belinda waves at an elegant Black couple sitting down to dinner. “When Black people see other Black people traveling, especially in spaces that are predominantly or historically white, it’s like this celebration that we’re here,” says Rothwell, who had shared the Ireland story with her friend and series creator Mike White.
Fans had speculated about Belinda’s return ever since we last saw her on the shores of Maui, rearranging her downcast expression into a warm smile to greet a fresh round of guests, her dreams of launching her own business having been dashed by Coolidge’s spoiled heiress, Tanya. Rothwell assumed Belinda’s arc was over. “I was sated,” she says. “I felt like, Yeah, that’s her complete story.” Then, in 2022, White casually floated the idea of revisiting her character. “I didn’t hold my breath,” says Rothwell, 44, who at the time was developing her own show for Hulu, How to Die Alone. “But I definitely crossed my fingers.”
She is low-key cozy on this rainy February day, wearing a tie-dyed jumpsuit from Big Bud Press, gold hoops, and a black head wrap. We’re sitting in a café across from the Broad museum in downtown L.A. after visiting a work by Kara Walker, one of her favorite artists. Rothwell lives not far from here. Ash from the fires that destroyed many parts of the city less than a month earlier rained down on the house she shares with her goldendoodle, Lloyd Dobler, and a newly adopted doodle mix named Wilson. The pups needed to be evacuated from their training center in Topanga Canyon, but she was able to stay put. “It scrambled my head a bit to understand the level of devastation that was going on within arms’ reach,” says Rothwell, who has since put together a go-bag. “I was not at all as prepared as I thought.”
Over the past decade, Rothwell has become the sort of versatile talent whose arrival made us more keenly aware of her absence. Her characters, including Belinda and Insecure’s hilariously uninhibited Kelli, are often frustratingly scarce within their respective series. Last year, How to Die Alone, about a lonely airport employee who tries to change her life after a near-death experience, finally premiered. Rothwell had been workshopping the show — which she created, produced, and starred in — for eight years, at the same time as she made her way to the big screen with small comical roles in movies including Love, Simon and Wonka. The day before we met, news broke that Hulu was pulling the plug on the series after one season. “Of all the projects on my slate, How to Die Alone was the priority,” she says. So despite the excitement around The White Lotus, Belinda’s thwarted dreams are resonating with Rothwell more than she’d like. “You can’t make it as far as I have without defeats,” she says, “but it’s hard because, like, what do I have to do to be worthy of airtime?”
Rothwell honed her sense of humor growing up as a military brat. Her father was in the Air Force, and they moved around a lot, living in Kansas, Turkey, New Jersey, and eventually Maryland. Each move was an opportunity for reinvention. She would be the quiet, mysterious kid, she says, or else the dependably nerdy study partner. “I grew up super-religious, and my mom refused to call deviled eggs ‘deviled eggs,’ so I grew up calling them ‘angel eggs,’” Rothwell told Sasheer Zamata and Nicole Byer in a podcast episode last year, and she would often try to make her three siblings laugh in church by holding the hymnal upside down and singing in weird voices.
She dabbled with improv during college, and not long after graduating she moved to Tokyo to teach English. After she returned to the States in 2009, she performed nights at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre while working for four years as a high-school theater teacher in the Bronx. In 2014, she auditioned for Saturday Night Live because the producers were actively looking for a Black woman. Her pal Sasheer Zamata landed the job, and Rothwell was instead hired to write, but her contract wasn’t renewed after one season. What happened? “I mean, I wouldn’t disagree with you if you said they fumbled the ball,” says Rothwell, who used several of the sketches that never made the cut for the 2016 Netflix special The Characters. Still, she says, she’d welcome the chance to host: “It’d be interesting to finally meet Lorne.”
On the shows that have defined her career thus far, Rothwell had a role behind the scenes as well. She moved to L.A. from Brooklyn in 2015 for a job in the writers’ room for Insecure, where creator Issa Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny “saw all of me,” she says. “They know that I’m a multi-hyphenate.” During some of the early table reads for season one, she infused Kelli with so much charisma that they offered her the part (and, by season four, the title of supervising producer). From then on, she was more selective about pitching story lines for the character. “I didn’t want it to feel like I was trying to jockey for her because I knew this is Issa and Molly’s story and I wanted to fiercely protect that,” she says, referring to Rae’s onscreen bestie played by Yvonne Orji.
She did push back on one plot point toward the end of the series. Rae had decided Kelli should have a baby despite the character having once cracked, “If I wanted a kid, I would have kept the last one.” “I did not like it,” Rothwell says, laughing and shaking her head. “I’m child free by choice, and I really gave my best argument on why it should remain the same. But Issa was so passionate about showing that people can change,” she says, “and, ultimately, not my show. If I could take my ego off the table, it makes sense.”
From the start, Rothwell was crucial to informing Belinda’s character on The White Lotus. “Mike’s very aware that he’s not a Black woman, and so there’s a perspective that he needs,” she says. “We sat down season one and went page by page with Belinda scenes. I would pitch lines, and it would be the same intent, but it would sound or feel more authentic for my POV.” Smaller flourishes of Rothwell’s also ended up in the script. She gave feedback on how her single-mother character would talk to her son (Nicholas Duvernay) and told the wardrobe department that Belinda would absolutely wear a bonnet to bed: “Those are vacation braids.” Neither Rothwell nor Belinda was a fan of the giant monitor lizard with whom her character shares a scene. “The animal people were like, ‘We want you to meet the lizard,’” she says, scrolling her phone to find the photo of her reluctantly petting her co-star’s scaly head. “I am not a nature girlie.”
White acknowledges that the casting of The White Lotus can reinforce the very stratification the show purports to illuminate, wherein the white wealthy guests are badly behaved while the nonwhite characters tend to be the obliging and morally less complicated staffers. Rothwell thinks “there are opportunities to approach Black wealth through a satirical lens,” she says, but she relishes playing “the heart of the show,” which is how both she and White view Belinda. “It becomes more complicated for me as a white writer if I was writing an Indian American family and those people are as crazy as the Ratliffs,” says White, referring to this season’s Waspy and weirdly close Carolinians, presided over by Parker Posey’s pill-popping matriarch. “There’s a lot more scrutiny. And I am just somebody that really doesn’t work well with a writing staff, so it’s something that I will continue to have to grapple with if I keep doing the show.”
The new season’s sprawling assortment of entitled tourists includes Michelle Monaghan as a TV star traveling with her catty childhood friends (Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb) and Walton Goggins as a taciturn sugar daddy seeking revenge. It appears poised to close the chapter that began when Tanya bailed on going into business with Belinda to be with her lover, Greg (Jon Gries), the only other returning character. Rothwell watched Tanya slip and fall to her death in the waters off Sicily in season two along with the rest of us, texting a shocked “WHAT?!? OMG” to Coolidge, who later messaged Rothwell “Go get ’em, girl” after her own return was announced. Now that Belinda has learned of Tanya’s fate, future episodes will make use of Rothwell’s comedic chops as she suspects Greg’s involvement in Tanya’s demise.
Rothwell spent months last year at the Four Seasons Koh Samui, where most scenes at the fictional resort were filmed. She and Posey gave themselves bruises by applying ice packs directly to their skin to cope with the equatorial sun. “Buddhists say want is the root of all suffering, so I had to stop wanting it to be cooler,” she says. White called Rothwell his “foxhole buddy,” relying on her experience as a showrunner. “It was a very brutal shoot,” he says. “Natasha knew what I was dealing with. To have somebody who was on the threads with all the other actors, keeping everybody’s spirits in the right place — she saved my ass.” When I told Rothwell this, she was touched by the recognition, bittersweet as it is amid the circumstances of losing her own show. Earlier, as we made our way to Walker’s African’t, a large-scale tableau of silhouettes depicting racially motivated violence, she wondered aloud why How to Die Alone was canceled, especially when the series’ primary ambassador, Onyx Collective, is a Disney-content brand dedicated to developing stories from people of color. She noted its relatively favorable reviews, its viewership numbers, and an Independent Spirit Award for the ensemble cast. (Hulu declined to provide streaming numbers, but a source close to the show confirmed that it was canceled because of low ratings.)
The show follows Mel after an accident on her 35th birthday leads her to question the life choices — bad friendships, unhappy romantic entanglements — that have left her feeling so adrift. Even though Rothwell was never as professionally stunted as Mel, she channeled much of what she worked through in her 20 years of therapy into the character. “The world views me a certain way, a plus-size Black woman, and you start to believe that love is not something you’re allowed to have, and you’re not allowed to love your body,” she says. “I was in a place where Mel was, definitely, in my 20s and early 30s.” Now, in her 40s, she’s working on being “more visible and vulnerable.” She describes herself as “neurospicy” and was diagnosed with ADHD last year. “My parents weren’t anti-mental-health care, but it just wasn’t a part of the conversation,” she says. “I remember saying to my very first therapist, ‘This is indulgent.’” She’s fine with being single. “Hopefully some wonderful man who is okay with a successful woman sees me,” she says, laughing, “but there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely. And I’m not lonely.”
She is working on an adaptation of the viral Reesa Teesa TikTok story “Who TF Did I Marry.” She got involved with the project while filming in Thailand, after so many random people (and one cousin) tagged her in Tareasa Johnson’s videos. Rothwell watched them and was inspired to negotiate for the rights to co-write and star. “I’m super-excited to play with that,” she says. And she is heartened by the outpouring of support for Mel and the concern for Belinda’s fate. “What’s cool is that I play characters that people root for,” she says. “So I feel like, cosmically, people are rooting for me.”
More on ‘The White Lotus’
- The White Lotus Recap: Party, Part I
- The White Lotus Kill-or-Be-Killed Report: Are We Having Fun Yet?
- At Thailand’s Real White Lotus Hotel, Where the Ultrarich Get Coddled