Natasha Rothwell and Sterling K. Brown Get Honest About ‘White Lotus' Rewrites, Doomsday and Being No. 1 on the Call Sheet: ‘For the Longest Time I Thought It Meant Something'
A beloved and fiery social media presence, the writer-actor-producer-showrunner hit a professional high this year with a triumphant return to HBO's 'The White Lotus.' She reprises her role as Belinda Lindsey, a masseuse trying to move on from the broken Season 1 promises of Jennifer Coolidge's flaky heiress. But in real life, she confesses to Sterling K. Brown that she's been researching underground doomsday vaults, given the state of global politics.
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It's the perfect topic for Brown, a three-time Emmy winner for projects like 'The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story' and 'This Is Us.' Teaming again with creator Dan Fogelman on Hulu's streaming hit 'Paradise,' Brown plays a Secret Service agent living in a city-sized bunker beneath a mountain in Colorado after a catastrophe on Earth. He's investigating the murder of the U.S. president and trying to find signs of his missing wife aboveground.
Survival is a common thread between the pair, as they've navigated a business full of inequities and unstable opportunities for work on-screen and behind the camera. There's plenty of joy to be had, however, as the two unpack their first time meeting on Issa Rae's seminal HBO comedy 'Insecure.' They also set some healthy boundaries, as Rothwell notes that Brown's appeal to mature women can sometimes lead to friction — even between her own mother and father.
Sterling K. Brown: You're so demure and refined. I was [shocked] by the way that you dropped into your wild character on 'Insecure' when we first met. You started on that show as a writer?
Natasha Rothwell: Yes. I was called into the office one day, and I thought I was getting in trouble for making too many dick jokes. I remember texting [Issa Rae], 'I think I just fucked up.' But they told me they wanted me to play my character Kelli, and I burst into tears.
But you — you're so charismatic and easy to watch. You almost broke up my parents' marriage. [My mother] loved 'Army Wives.'
Brown: Give me the story.
Rothwell: I thought, 'If [Sterling] comes up here and ruins 47 years of marriage, I'm going to be upset.'
Brown: I'm big with a certain set. The older Black women and me, we got a thing. But let's talk about 'The White Lotus.' It's white; we're Black. It's all good.
Rothwell: I was in the HBO family because of 'Insecure,' but it was 2020 — peak COVID, pre-vaccination. They were just like, 'Who is dumb enough to leave their house right now?' I had a meeting with Mike White, and I'd been a fan of his from 'Chuck & Buck' and 'Freaks and Geeks.'
But I want to talk about 'Paradise.' Are you as scared for the fate of humanity as I am? If you look at my Google search history, you might see a bunker company or two.
Brown: My wife and I have a bunker in our home. I think a lot of midcentury-modern homes have them, because they were built right after World War II. We sealed it up so the kids wouldn't be playing down there. It can hold about 30 people.
Rothwell: You have my number, right?
Brown: I got you.
Rothwell: It's wild how your show flirts with what's happening now. How close it seems we are to an extinction-level event that is a consequence of humanity.
Brown: Dan Fogelman created it, as he did 'This Is Us.' He told me he was writing something with my voice in mind, and said, 'Take a look.' If I responded to it, great; if not, no big deal. I wrote him back saying, 'Amen.' He thought I said 'Amen' because Black people just randomly say 'Amen.' He asked what that meant, and I said, 'I'm in, dumbass.'
Rothwell: Did he loosely pitch this to you or did you get eyes on the page?
Brown: This is a Fogelman thing, and he's explained [his process] to me on a podcast that we do for 'This Is Us': He always writes the first one, and then he shows it to the studio. Either they like it or they don't. His feeling is 'I don't want notes. This is the thing that I've conceived. Do you like it or do you not like it? If you don't, then I can move on.'
Rothwell: 'Paradise' is so tonally different from 'This Is Us.' To have that kind of artistry expressed by the same man, were you kind of caught off guard by that? Or did you know he had the capacity?
Brown: I knew he had the capacity for anything; he can write his ass off. He's done 'Crazy, Stupid, Love.,' 'Life Itself' — dude is all over the place. He, like me, is eager to have opportunities to show the diversity of what he can do.
Rothwell: I was texting with Mr. James Marsden this morning. I asked him about his experience with you, or even for something innocuous that feels like it says a lot about your character. He told me a little anecdote about how you've passed up being No. 1 on the call sheet many times because for you it's not about the numbers but about the work. And so I'll just reflect that back to you. I think for me, for the longest time, I thought it meant something.
After Season 1 of 'The White Lotus' wrapped, I pulled Mike White aside and I got emotional. I went to school for acting like you did — we contain multitudes — but my entry point into the industry was comedy writing for 'Saturday Night Live.' It's been so hard to get the industry to see all of me. And they can be really entrenched in 'She's the funny, fat Black lady. We're going to put her in this corner, and that's the box she's in.' For Mike to give me Belinda, it was like he opened a cage that I felt the edges of. Now I can imagine the freedom of being able to show all of yourself when you see a role that can unlock something in you. And as [a writer], I feel authorship I didn't have for a long time. I had relegated myself as No. 12 on the call sheet in my real life. Do you know what I mean?
Brown: I do. I look at this acting thing as sort of controlled schizophrenia, in that there's so many people inside of me, and each character gives me an opportunity to let one aspect of myself out.
Rothwell: I feel that when I write. The best quote is 'Writing is awful, but it's wonderful to have written.' The process can be painful — it feels like an exorcism of sorts, for me to be able to put pen to paper and to allow aspects of my personality to bleed in all the characters. It's also such an exercise in control, because you have to be restrained and not just be indulgent and make it all about you — it has to be about the subtext of what you're exploring.
Brown: Is there joy in just acting, because you wear so many hats? And being on location so far removed from everybody?
Rothwell: I was in post for [my Hulu series] 'How to Die Alone' when I went to Thailand. I felt like, 'I don't got to worry about nothing. Something wrong with catering? Don't care.' For Season 3 of 'Lotus,' I'm just protecting Belinda; I'm holding her safe.
Brown: We are blessed. What is it like for you to be working? Because we all have friends that are in this business and not as blessed right now. There's been a contraction. How is your community reflecting that contraction back to you?
Rothwell: The contraction is not just being observed, it's felt. 'How to Die Alone' only had one season. I see my friends who are caterers, costumers, makeup artists. I want to make sure they're going to survive this great contraction. I just got back from the TED conference in Vancouver, and it's terrifying about what we're up against as artists to protect our work and to make sure that AI isn't just generating versions of talents that have been curated over years and years of study and apprenticeship.
Brown: I think we're made of strong stuff. I also remind myself that the industry is just 100 years old. When I first started, there was a thing called pilot season. There was many a network drama. There was many a serialized. There were 22 to 24 episodes. Now we're doing six or eight. And so much has left Los Angeles.
Rothwell: There was a game show shooting near us in Thailand.
Brown: I was just working in Australia, and there were seven other productions living in my hotel.
Rothwell: There's a little bit of 'Molly, you in danger, girl' about it all.
Brown: Speaking of Belinda and the last 'White Lotus,' she's in a moral conundrum because she's [avoiding] a man she knows by another name who was not good to his wife. You ultimately wind up approaching him, and he hits you with an indecent proposal. What would Natasha do in Belinda's situation? Take the money and run?
Rothwell: I think that Belinda saw an opportunity to get something she fundamentally believed she deserved. She's a moral center for the show. I'm scared for her, because I do think karma is real and the money is blood money.
That storyline was my pitch.
Brown: Was it really?
Rothwell: It was my pitch. Listen, this is why I love Mike White. Originally it was Belinda's son, Zion, running the show. I told Mike I really wanted to see Belinda have agency in this moment. Can she take over the negotiation in some way? What is an authentic way for her to show that she's pushing her chips in along with her son? Being able to show that turn, she sees that she has power over a white man — the kind of man that she's been rubbing the backs of for a long time.
Brown: Is she breaking bad?
Rothwell: I don't know that she's breaking bad, but I think she feels that there's an opportunity here. I also come from a place of great empathy. I remember when I was first able to not think about money 24/7. I used to carry around a check in my wallet when I was fucking broke. I wrote it for the amount of my student loans just to say, 'Someday I'm going to be able to [pay this].'
Brown: Did the money Belinda got also quell her on the idea of going into partnership with Pornchai [played by Dom Hetrakul]?
Rothwell: That pisses me off. People are just like, 'Oh, you just left Pornchai on the side of the road.' She fucked the dude one night. She had a one-night stand. She owed him nothing. Belinda had an opportunity to betray herself again, but no. Circumstances changed.
For you, your performance contains so much vulnerability and selflessness in moments. How do you find that, when I think so often the really human default is fear and 'I got to save me'?
Brown: My character is someone who's been without his best friend and partner for three years. He's incomplete. And he's raising two children by himself, knowing that this wasn't how it was supposed to be. When he's introduced to the idea that his family could be reunited —
Rothwell: He paused when he was in that shower with your co-star Sarah Shahi. I really need to let you know … [Rothwell shows her leg suggestively]
Brown: Peloton. I'm 49 years old, and the fact that anybody wants to see 49-year-old booty, it makes me happy.
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This essay is adapted from Merrick Morton's 'La Bamba: A Visual History,' published by Hat & Beard Press. 'Dance!! Dance!! Dance!! to the music of the Silhouettes Band!!' read the handbill. The Silhouettes featured Ritchie Valens — 'the fabulous Lil' Richi and his Crying Guitar!!' — at a 1958 appearance at the San Fernando American Legion Hall in Southern California. He was 16 years old. The Silhouettes was Ritchie's first band, and they launched him into history. But a silhouette itself is an interesting thing: You can see the general shape of something while you hardly know the figure casting the shadow. Valens' musical story begins with the Silhouettes, and we have been filling in his story, and projecting ourselves onto it, ever since he left. A founding father of rock 'n' roll, he would lose his life barely a year later, when the plane carrying members of the Winter Dance Party Tour — Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Valens — crashed on Feb. 3, 1959, in an Iowa snowstorm. A Chicano icon. A stranger. Ritchie was a kid playing his guitar to make money for his family and one song he played was a version of 'Malagueña.' The number was rooted in centuries-old Spanish flamenco music that had spread in all directions, becoming a classical music melody and a Hollywood soundtrack go-to by the 1950s. In his hands, it became a catapult for guitar hero god shots. 'Malagueña' communicated experience and rico suave flair to his audience. Meanwhile, his mom was selling homemade tamales at his shows in the American Legion Hall. This guileless 17-year-old, Chicano kid from Pacoima found a way to introduce himself to America by taking something familiar and making it feel like nothing you had heard before. From the beginning, Ritchie heard the possibilities in turning a familiar sound forward. He saw, even as the teenager he will forever be to us, how in reinventing a song, you could reinvent yourself. Listen to 'Donna,' the heartfelt love ballad that felt familiar to Chicano ears, listeners who for years had tuned in to Black vocal groups. In the process, he cleared the way for so much great Chicano soul to come in the next two decades. Most of all, of course, listen to 'La Bamba.' A centuries-old song from Veracruz, Mexico; the tune has African, Spanish, Indigenous and Caribbean DNA. In the movie, he encounters the song for the first time when his brother Bob takes him to a Tijuana brothel, but however he first heard it, Valens viewed it as a prism, a way of flooding all that was in front of him with his voice and guitar. The music he made came from Mexico, and it came from Los Angeles, where 1940s Spanish-language swing tunes, Black doo-wop sounds and hillbilly guitar-plucking were mashed together in a molcajete y tejolote. Most of all, it came from the radio, which lined up sounds that were not like the ones that came right before and blasted them out on AM stations from corner to corner across the Southland. Radio devoured difference and transformed it, and if Ritchie is now regarded as a pioneer of Chicano music, he was in his own, brief time, a product of AM democracy, a silhouette with a spotlight shining on him. Danny Valdez knew all the songs. In the early 1970s, the artist and activist had released 'Mestizo,' billed as the first Chicano protest album put out by a major label. The singer-songwriter and his buddy Taylor Hackford would drink beer, belt out Ritchie Valens songs and make big plans. They talked about someday shooting a movie together, with Valdez playing Ritchie and Hackford directing. 'Neither of us had a pot to piss in,' said Hackford, 'so we never made that movie.' But years later, after Hackford had a hit with 'An Officer and A Gentleman,' Valdez called him and raised the idea once more. There were many steps to getting 'La Bamba' on the screen, but it began with an understanding that it would be about the music. That meant they had to make the music feel alive — namely the handful of recordings produced by Bob Keane that Ritchie left behind. The owner of Del-Fi Records, Keane was a guiding figure in the singer's life, recording his songs, urging him to mask his ethnicity by changing his name from Richard Steven Valenzuela and giving him career advice. Keane booked Gold Star Studios, cheap at $15 an hour, and brought in great session musicians as Ritchie's backing band, including future Wrecking Crew members Earl Palmer and Carol Kaye. But the recordings he made were not state of the art, even in their own time. 'They weren't high-quality,' said Hackford, comparing them to the early Ray Charles sessions for the Swing Time label. 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I don't think we could have found other musicians to cover him. They come from East L.A., they're all Chicanos. They were paying an homage. We happened to be in the airport together when they got the news that 'La Bamba' had become number one in the national charts.' 'They called themselves the spiritual inheritors of Ritchie Valens,' says Hackford. 'And they went in and re-recorded Ritchie's songs plus several that he had played in concert but never recorded.' Now Hackford had his own album of old tunes that turned in a forward direction. Next, Hackford made sure there were roles for modern performers to play the classic rockers from the Winter Dance Party Tour. He cast contemporary performers who could re-record their material too: Marshall Crenshaw as Buddy Holly, Brian Setzer as Eddie Cochran and Howard Huntsberry as Jackie Wilson. Then there's the surprise of the first song heard in the film — a rumbling version of Bo Diddley's 'Who Do You Love?' that had Carlos Santana, hired as a soundtrack composer, playing with Los Lobos, and Bo himself offering a fresh vocal over everything. 'We were so happy to have the touch of Carlos Santana as part of Ritchie's story,' said Luis Valdez. 'It's his guitar that underscores a lot of the scenes and he had a theme for each of the players. We screened the whole movie for him first and he was very moved by it and ready to go right away once he saw it without his contribution. He was alone on the soundstage at Paramount, where we recorded his soundtrack, doing his magic with his guitar. He became a great friend as a result of that. It's incredible what an artist can do.' The original soundtrack recording topped the Billboard pop charts and went double platinum. Hackford loved pop music; his first feature film, 'The Idolmaker' (1980), was a rock musical. Releasing hit music became a key promotional element of the package. In advance of 1982's 'An Officer and a Gentleman' came 'Up Where We Belong' by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. It went to No. 1 a week after the opening. For 1984's 'Against All Odds,' he selected Phil Collins to sing the title cut, a song released three weeks before opening; the song soon went No. 1. 1985's 'White Nights' had two No. 1 songs, Lionel Ritchie's 'Say You Say Me' and Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin's duet 'Separate Lives.' One looming problem for 'La Bamba' was that the 1987 moviegoing public was not familiar with the name Ritchie Valens. Hackford had ideas for that as well. He set out to introduce him to contemporary audiences — convincing the studio to fund a unique teaser trailer to run weeks before the official movie trailer went into theaters. The producer assembled a parade of familiar faces to reintroduce Valens. The short film included Canadian hitmaker Bryan Adams and Little Richard talking about the icon. There was also the vision of Bob Dylan in a top-down convertible riding along the Pacific Coast Highway. The 17-year-old Dylan was present at a Valens concert in Duluth, Minn., just days before the plane crashed; he popped up talking about what Valens' music meant to him. 'You bet it made a difference,' said Hackford. After the 'La Bamba' soundtrack became a hit (there was also a Volume Two), Los Lobos made the most of their elevated success. They had experienced head-turning celebrity with 'La Bamba,' and they followed it up with 'La Pistola y El Corazón,' a gritty selection of mariachi and Tejano songs played on acoustic traditional instruments. They had banked cultural capital and directed their large new audience to this music that many had never heard before. 'La Pistola y El Corazón' won a Grammy in 1989 for Mexican-American performance. The 'La Bamba' soundtrack helped set a precedent for the crossover global success of Latin music, which has become a major force in mainstream pop culture. From Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez to Shakira, Bad Bunny, Peso Pluma, Becky G, Anitta, J Balvin, Karol G and Maluma, among others who are dominating the charts, racking up billions of streams, headlining massive tours and festivals. Does Hackford think 'La Bamba' helped set the table for subsequent Latino pop star success? 'I think the one who set the table was Ritchie Valens. He recorded a song in Spanish, a rock 'n' roll version of a folk song, and he made it a huge hit. 'I challenge you, any party you go to — wedding reception, bar mitzvah, whatever it is — when 'La Bamba' comes on, the tables clear and everybody gets up to dance. That's Ritchie Valens; he deserves that credit. We came afterwards.' RJ Smith is a Los Angeles-based author. He has written for Blender, the Village Voice, Spin, GQ and the New York Times Magazine. 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