Any fan of Insecure could spot Natasha Rothwell’s talent immediately—her ease in front of the camera, her expertise with a punch line, her distinctive feel for structure and genre. Both a writer and actor on the HBO half hour since its inception, she emerged as a scene-stealer playing Kelli Prenny, the wild friend of Issa Rae’s protagonist, as well as the name behind some of the show’s best scripts, including season four’s rom-com-infused “Lowkey Happy.”
So where would this breakout gig take the multihyphenate? In 2021, we got our first glimpse at Rothwell’s next phase. Before Insecure’s final season launched, she scored raves in The White Lotus for her rich work as weathered hotel employee Belinda, who strikes up a tenuous bond with Jennifer Coolidge’s loopy, boozy, wealthy guest. Featured among a star-studded cast that also included Connie Britton and Steve Zahn, the HBO series from creator Mike White proved Rothwell’s bona fides as a dramatic actor. Then, for Insecure’s return this past fall, Rothwell played new shades of the role that’s defined her career so far—and there were new opportunities behind the scenes too: She made her directorial debut on the hilarious sixth episode, “Tired, Okay?!”
Now she enters a new year loaded with promise, and redefined before an industry all too willing to box people—particularly, women of color—into narrow stereotypes. Rothwell spoke over Zoom with Vanity Fair from London, just before Insecure finished its run on HBO, where she was shooting the Warner Bros. film Wonka—yet another marker of just how high she’s soaring.
Vanity Fair: You’re in London shooting Wonka. This is your life now. What’s the feeling?
Natasha Rothwell: I mean, it’s just surreal. I’m just waiting for someone to wake me up on the 6 Train in New York and being like, “You missed your stop,” and all of this will have been a dream. I’m just trying to stay asleep as long as possible.
Timothée Chalamet was never wearing that hat. That movie doesn’t exist.
[Laughs] He doesn’t exist. Jim Carter isn’t an angel. Don’t worry about it.
Well, alas, it is very much real.
It is, it is. I’ve been here a little over two months now and during Christmas time, which is also just like the best Love, Actually, Bridget Jones vibes this little Anglophile could ever ask for.
I’ve been thinking about you being there, in the context of Insecure. You’re off filming this huge project on another continent while the final season is airing.
I know. It’s been incredibly difficult not to be in the continental U.S. during this last season, not to feel like my boots are on the ground. Thank God for social media, I’ve been able to interact and scratch that itch, but there’s nothing like being there in the States and not [being] super tired trying to stay up to watch an episode. I’m just so grateful because I’m in this position because of the show. I’m able to be shooting a movie internationally with stars who I would’ve never thought would know my name, let alone what I look like, dressed up in a period costume. So it is just this interesting mix of emotions. It’s bittersweet, in the truest sense.
You’ve been with Insecure since the beginning, both writing and acting with it. So I’ll start with writing: Over five seasons on the show, how do you think you’ve grown as a writer?
Immensely. I think the collaborative nature of the way we write on the show spoke to how I generally like to do things. I love a team sport, that’s why I never did stand up. I prefer improv and sketch comedy. The collaborative nature of creation has always been my go-to, so to be in a writer’s room with the smartest, funniest, most insightful people and to tell stories together, that was really transformative. Over the course of the production as well, understanding writing from the standpoint of writing for other people and not just myself, which I’d done prior to—the voices of the characters and specifically what they need in order to get major story points and themes across. All of those considerations have made me a better writer.
Seeing Issa’s clarity of vision and how much that aided in the execution really helped me as a writer and as a creator and being able to know what I need to say and do to make sure my vision is clear when I’m doing things for other projects. There’s the quote, “Be prolific, not perfect.” And when you’re on a show for five seasons, your work is prolific because you’re writing constantly, you’re pitching jokes. The number of dick jokes Kelli has in a folder, I mean, c’mon, it’s just... [Laughs] There’s a lot of material generated. When you are prolific and not perfect and you’re not caught up on trying to make sure every semicolon is in the right place and you’re just getting ideas down, you inevitably become better. Your bad becomes good and your good becomes great and your great becomes five seasons.
And this year you got your first directing credit. It’s an incredibly funny episode, which didn’t surprise me. I’m curious, for the real specifics of it for you, what was liberating about it? How did you find actual experience?
There’s a really shitty MS-DOS computer game when I was growing up called Monkey’s Island. I don’t even know if anyone else but me and my family know it. But this character in this video game collects all of these different trinkets on his journey across Monkey’s Island. And he has no clue why he needs a cup or frog or this skull until he shows up at the end, and you’re like, Oh, all of these tools that he’s been collecting over the course of me playing this dumb computer game, they all make sense now. I felt a little bit like that character where I was just like, Oh, all of these skills that I get from producing and acting and having been on a ton of sets and having been directed by tons of people—I was able to synthesize all of those tools that I’ve picked up and see them at work. It was really cathartic and satisfying.
I didn’t want it to be received by the cast and crew as obligatory and like, Oh, she’s doing this, but she’s not queen. Or, she’s getting the credit, but she’s not really going to do the work. But that’s definitely not who I am. I came in overprepared and early and ready every day and really wanted to do the work. This wasn’t a thing to add to my resume. To me, this was opening up an additional hyphenate that I planned to explore on other projects as well. So it was truly the first time directing, not the last time.
Did anything about it surprise you?
I spoke with Patty Jenkins who had directed me in Wonder Woman 1984 for truly five seconds, but we clicked and I just asked her, I was just like, well, or I told her rather, I said, “One of my biggest fears is in technical terms, specifically having to do with the camera. I know what I want to achieve, but I just don’t know what they call it. And she’s like, “Well, one, ask. Two, you don’t need to know, you just have to communicate your vision and they’ll know what terms to use. And it’s your job to be a student and learn and continue to grow.” And that’s exactly what happened. It was surprising in that, when someone says something’s going to happen, you’re like, all right. I don’t know if they’re going to be that right…. I learned new terminology. I’m like, “Okay, so a cowboy shot is from your cowboy hips up. Okay, got that.” [Laughs] “We’re going to do a dollhouse shot.”
Turning to White Lotus, which also felt like something new for you, at least from the outside looking in. I know you’ve talked about people seeing you as Kelli, as one and the same, more than they probably should. I imagine you were ready to show you could do other things.
Right, right. 100%. I went to school for theater and I’m classically trained and so had done dramatic roles before. Being Belinda was the first time I realized that the general public was not at my senior showcase in college. “Okay, got it. They didn’t see me at the studio theater in D.C. That’s weird.” [Laughs] So I was looking for other roles that weren’t comedic, but not because of Kelli—just because, as an actor, the general diversity of what I get to do is the draw, right? Being able to do and be different things. Saying yes to Belinda wasn’t coming out of deprivation, it was just excitement.
I’m curious about the specifics of your early talks with Mike White about the show. I know the role wasn’t written specifically for a woman of color and you’d wanted to make sure that nuances were taken into consideration. How did you find him there? What kinds of things came up? What was that conversation like?
Since it wasn’t written with any race consideration, I knew that those words coming out of my mouth would just mean something different. And I think, given our social political climate and what it means to see a person of color in a servile position to a largely homogenous white group of people of a certain class…I wanted to talk to him about that. And he couldn’t have been more game. So much of it was on the page, but it was also just having those conversations and elevating what was on the page by that understanding, if that makes sense. Just having that insight and those conversations allowed his direction and my portrayal to really speak to that quiet storm that so many people of color have to deal with when you are financially obligated to keep your mouth shut if you want to keep your job. Those insights that I had just because of the lenses with which I read this script were different from his.
He was so willing to hear my point of view and make adjustments when necessary. I’m thinking specifically of the conversation that Belinda has with her son. I remember saying to Mike, in between takes, “Black people talk different when they’re just us. It’s just us on the phone so there’s going to be code switching that happens where there’s not other white people around where we are just going to be real.” Adjustments to that scene were made to speak to that reality. It’s just those small things that allowed Belinda to feel authentic and real.
And how did you find him as a director? Were you thinking about it knowing what was coming down the pike for you?
When I was shooting, I knew that I would be directing [Insecure]. We didn’t know what episodes, but I think we were still—the writer’s room hadn’t even been done yet, it was supposed to start the following year and we shot the end of 2020. [Pause] Yeah, that’s right. I was just like, pre-vaccination? My timeline now is all pandemic hits. [Laughs]
The endless stages of COVID are the only ways we can mark time.
Oh, 100%. But yeah, I don’t know how to say it without it sounding silly, but he really is like a composer: The words on the page are these musical notes and he’s hitting them the right way. When everyone’s doing their individual scenes, they’re like individual instruments and you don’t really see the beauty of the symphony until you watch it. I remember all of us watching at the premiere and we’re like, “Wow.” I understood what Jennifer and I were doing but I really didn’t know what was going on otherwise. I mean, obviously I read all the scripts, but just seeing what those characters looked like, lived in. I just appreciated the specificity of those moments that he created and the symphony that he was getting us to play toward.
Being a part of that cast and integral member of it and volleying with people like Jennifer Coolidge, how do you feel in terms of your place in the industry coming off of that? Do you think that it maybe would make you a little bit less typecast or boxed-in now versus how you were before?
It’s hard for me to even articulate, because I think that how others see me, my whole life, I can’t really hang my hat on that because how I’m perceived as a woman of color inside the industry and outside of the industry, it’s so subjective and loaded. And so it’s hard when you can benefit from that. You know what I mean? Of just trying to understand what it is that this specific role in this specific piece provoked in the viewer that allowed them to see me in a new way. Just walking through the world as a woman of color, it’s, “What does it take to change people’s perspective of how I’m viewed?” It’s an interesting space to be in. I’m for sure grateful that it has opened the industry’s eyes as to what I’m capable of. But I guess the positive consequence for me would be if the industry would look at other actors of color, other people that they’ve wanted to put in a box, and reconsider—that would be the win, yeah. I think that would be the bigger win.
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