A little bit before its September 13 premiere on Hulu, Natasha Rothwell, along with Vera Santamaria welcomed an audience for the How To Die Alone premiere in Los Angeles. The pair serve as co-showrunners of the comedy from Onyx Collective with Rothwell also serving as creator, writer, and star of the series.
After giving thanks to the cast and crew that made the one-of-a-kind comedy happen, Rothwell said something to the effect of “And if you can please let me have this moment to take a look at the crowd…”
As she said this, tears welled up in her eyes as the crowd cheered for her success. I would have cried, but I had no tears left to spare after watching a series that dissects love, grief, relationships, loneliness, and existential crises with a loud cackle and a heavy — but open heart.
Natasha Rothwell and Vera Santamaria at the premiere
of ‘How To Die Alone’ in Los Angeles on September 4, 2024
How To Die Alone follows Rothwell’s Melissa — or “Mel“, a 35-year-old Black, fat JFK airport employee with an empty bank account who is going through some shit. Paving the road to her way to a midlife crisis, Mel is stuck — and she has a fear of flying to boot.
She’s in the middle of healing her wounds from a breakup with what might have been her soulmate Alex (Jocko Sims) and continues to navigate her rocky relationship with her brother Brian (Bashir Salahuddin). Mel finds solace spending time with her hella messy BFF with a heart of gold Rory (Conrad Ricamora), her co-worker Terrence (KeiLyn Durrel Jones) as well as her pals Allie (Jaylee Hamidi) and Tamika (Melissa DuPrey).
But, after a near-death experience while assembling Ikea furniture, Mel’s life starts to change course — with plenty of turbulence along the way. This is something that Rothwell connects to unapologetically.
“It’s been hugely transformative to put pen to paper on a subject matter that is so personal, and it was a sort of radical act of vulnerability to literally put my shit out there,” Rothwell told me during a recent interview. “And that was the product of like 20-plus years of therapy of understanding that vulnerability is the key to unlocking loneliness.”
The title alone: How To Die Alone can be translated into many things but for Rothwell it was introspective. One of the many parts of the inspiration for the series came from a moment when Rothwell was sitting in Urgent Care at Cedars Sinai Medical Center after unadvisedly taking ibuprofen — a medicine she is allergic to. She said she ballooned up like Will Smith in Hitch when he had his allergic reaction.
“I just had dental work and was in tons of pain and had to drive myself there,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a near-death experience, but it was being in a packed Urgent Care and feeling very lonely.” She later said, “You can’t help if you die alone, but I sure as fuck don’t want to die lonely — and that’s the idea.”
When Rothwell had the opportunity to do the show, she wanted to follow that fear. “I wanted to face those fears head-on, and talk about the difference between those two emotions.”
After a global pandemic, racial reckoning, a wildly uncertain run of Presidential elections (which is not over yet), strikes in Hollywood, and another boiling hot garbage pile of global problems, the examination of loneliness and being alone is very much needed. Understandably, these two emotions can be heavy to handle — and that’s where the comedy and vulnerability come in.
Rothwell wanted to create a show that connected with audiences. “It was allowing myself to be vulnerable, to talk about things that I still struggle with — you don’t graduate with a diploma from therapy. You work on that shit all the time!” she laughed. “You are just refining your response time to your bullshit… and so being able to work those things out on the show was a reminder of how far I’ve come — and it was also an opportunity to connect.”
In addition to loneliness, Rothwell explored grief. Not just grief in the obvious sense, but also grieving who we were when we were younger. “There are a lot of things that we grieve, but I think that one of the things that I found the most healing is, it’s collective grief,” she pointed out. “It’s connecting to people as we process what our bodies go through when we age; when we lose parents; when we through pandemics — and when we live through, you know, an election!”
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Being 45, single, and trying to figure out my second act like J. Lo, How To Die Alone spoke to my goddam soul in a way that reminded me to live a life… or at least try to. The show’s irreverent take on grief and loneliness, as well as Rory’s thirst for messiness… makes me feel less lonely.
“So much [of the show] is mined from my life, and specifically the unhealed version of myself,” she told me. “I was able to drop all of those idiosyncrasies into different characters, but most of them are on Mel.”
From episode one, Mel and Rory’s relationship is established, but as the series goes on, we see a very relatable journey of adulthood friend dynamics. “In terms of Mel’s relationship with Rory… here are two people encouraging each other’s bad behavior, and they were toxic,” she explained. “Mel is being activated to grow, and she’s trying to decide if he wants to grow with her or go and I think all of these crises of conscience in your relationships present themselves at this age where we need to really audit those people in our lives to see if they need to be in our lives.”
Rothwell thinks that friendships and sibling-ships are interesting things to explore.”How do you navigate that and not regress to who you were when you guys were fighting over who was going to empty the dishwasher in the kitchen?”
The tense relationship between Mel and Brian illustrates this question vividly throughout the season, capturing that siblinghood arrested development. In particular, there is one particular episode where Mel and Brian have a chat — and they have a lot to chat about. It is one of a handful of moments in the series that is engaging like a play, rather than a TV show.
“The texture of this show has a lot of different fibers,” said Rothwell. “There are moments of a lot of comedy. There’s a lot of drama. It feels true to life, but the theatricality of some of those moments was really important to me.”
She continued, “We referred to that scene as the one-act play because we wanted to let it breathe. We wanted to not make it dynamic. We just wanted to be in it and have the real conversation.”
Rothwell compares it to watching a play because you have no choice but to watch what’s on that stage whether it’s a car crash, a fight, or someone healing. She is keen on shows that allow real-life conversations in the time that it actually takes to have a real-life conversation. “That’s not the DNA of every episode, but when it made sense I loved to lean into that theatricality, for sure.”
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Rothwell’s Kelli on Insecure remains a fan favorite and the character reached iconic status in television history when she was tased at Coachella during Beyoncé’s performance. But would Kelli get along with Mel?
“That’s a great question,” she laughed. “I think so… [Kelli] is very quick to read Issa to filth and tell her ‘No, bitch! You broke! You can’t! You got no money! I think Mel would have to listen to Kelli’s stern but loving advice often!”
In 2019, my New Hollywood Podcast co-host Amanda N’Duka had the opportunity to chat with Rothwell ahead of the fourth season of Insecure. Since then, she has appeared in numerous films and TV series including Love, Simon, Sonic the Hedgehog, Wonder Woman 1984, Wonka, Wish, and she will reprise her role as Belinda in the third season of The White Lotus. She is also developing an adaptation of the viral TikTok series Who TF Did I Marry?
Come September 13, she steps into the spotlight as the leading woman in How To Die Alone, which she told me she was working on when we interviewed her during my Deadline days. I ask Rothwell, what it would have been to see a show like How To Die Alone when she was younger. Rothwell smiles and jokingly accuses trying to make her cry.
“Everything I do is for her,” Rothwell said as I tried not to cry. “It’s for the girl who was looking for herself on screen and didn’t see it; who was looking for a version of herself that, made her feel okay with not having it all figured out.”
