Natasha Rothwell Says She ‘Felt Like Twins’ with Who TF Did I Marry?’s Reesa Teesa When They First Met (Exclusive)

Natasha Rothwell is eager to bring Reesa Teesa’s viral multi-part TikTok series to the screen — but not for the reasons you might think.

The actress tells PEOPLE she was “tagged in so many videos” related to the series while she was in Thailand filming season 3 of The White Lotus.

Her phone was blowing up, but it wasn’t until one of her cousins sent her a “doctored up movie cover of me in Who TF Did I Marry?” that she said, “‘I got to see what this is about.'”
“I binged it on site,” Rothwell, 43, admits of Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson’s jarring 52-part series about her tumultuous marriage and divorce from a man she refers to as Legion.

Rothwell says that her first thought after watching the series — which has amassed more than 6 million views on each of the 52 videos — was not, “Oh, how do I make this into something?” Instead, she was thinking, “‘I want to do everything in my power to help this woman get her flowers,’ because it was the most vulnerable act of honesty [and] radical vulnerability that I’d ever seen.”

The actress says that there were “very competitive” negotiations happening in Hollywood regarding the story, but her representatives encouraged her to meet with Johnson to share her vision for the series.

“It was not her trauma that interested me and [made me] want to throw my hat in the ring, it was her — who she is as a person, how she survived all of it — and viral fame, how she’s surviving that. I was like, ‘Oh, now this is when I lean in.'”

Her experience over nearly eight years working on How to Die Alone — the Hulu series she created, produced and stars in that premiered earlier this month — influenced how she navigated the meeting.

“Everyone in Hollywood was fighting to get it, and I think I took the same approach I did with How to Die Alone, where it’s just like — if it’s meant to be, it will happen.”

Her strategy paid off. “I got the call from my team, [and they said], ‘She specifically wants to work with you. You saw her in the meeting. She felt seen. It wasn’t opportunistic.'”

The former Saturday Night Live writer says she was “so honored” Johnson chose her, and when the series was announced on Sept. 4, the TikToker wrote in a post that she’s “BEYOND excited to work with THE Natasha Rothwell” — so the feeling is clearly mutual.

The pair met up for the first time in person for dinner earlier this month, and Rothwell says they felt “like twins” right off the bat.

“We were just in such a mutual love bubble of just enjoying each other and understanding each other and learning about each other,” she gushes.

In terms of the actual logistics of the project though, Rothwell says it’s still in “a very nascent stage.”

“But I’m definitely excited to approach her story in a 360 [degree] way and not just…retell the story we’ve all consumed. I think she’s far more interesting than what has happened to her.”

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