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Insecure's Natasha Rothwell: 'I was deeply obsessed with David Brent'

<span>Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO</span>
Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO

Your TV guilty pleasure

Anything on HGTV [Home and Garden Television]. I just love home improvement shows, from redecorating to renovating to gardening. It sounds super cheesy, but I think we need more of that spirit of wanting to improve things and make people’s lives better. Finding beauty in the rubble is my jam. I have the channel on all the time – I even put it on when I leave the house to keep my dog company.

The last TV show you loved

I May Destroy You has been amazing. It is incredible to have a sexual assault as the centrepiece of a series, but for it not to overshadow everything. Arabella (Michaela Coel) is processing this intense trauma but she isn’t defined by it. It’s a fantastic exploration of that specific pain, with humour and biting wit. It’s been frustrating to not be able to binge it, but I think having a week between the episodes has made the heart grow fonder.

The show that should never have been cancelled

One Day at a Time, which was cancelled on Netflix and then went over to [US network] Pop. I think what they have done is so incredible in terms of storytelling and representation, by using the framework of a very white show but diversifying it [with a Latino cast]. It is really powerful.

… and the show that should be cancelled

Everything on Fox News. It’s a propaganda machine that causes more harm than good.

The show you wish you could guest star on

Succession. I have a theatre background and it feels so Shakespearean. I love the high-class, high-stakes drama of it. I get seen as someone who’s just a comedy person, but I’m itching to be bad and play a villain, so that would be a really fun job. Plus, they get to shoot on yachts. I love Russian Doll, too. I’m a big fan of Natasha Lyonne, and not just because we share a name.

Money troubles ... a scene from Succession
Money troubles ... a scene from Succession. Photograph: Peter Kramer/AP

Your favourite show when you were 10

The Cosby Show was such an important part of my childhood. There were very few characters I could identify with on TV at that time as a person of colour, and the Huxtables were the closest thing to a representation of my family on screen. Those memories are still very precious to me, but it is painful to remember them knowing what we now know about Bill Cosby.

The best episode of TV ever made

I came to the US version of The Office kicking and screaming – I was deeply obsessed with David Brent and that original cast of Stephen Merchant, Lucy Davis and Martin Freeman, and I didn’t think that we would do it justice. But the US version doesn’t try to improve on perfection, it just allows the best parts of the original to permeate it. The dinner-party episode is a pressure cooker of subtext, which is one of my favourite aspects of storytelling. You have Michael and Jan going through this horrible time while trying to host their friends and co-workers and pretending like nothing’s going on. It turns into this game of “Let’s all ignore the 500-pound gorilla in the room.”

The TV death that made you cry

The episode of Grey’s Anatomy when Denny dies is so heartwrenching. It’s not pretty, it’s not cute – it’s just pain. I’m a hopeless romantic and I like a happy ending so my heart was broken that Izzie, played by Katherine Heigl, was losing her person. It was a Game of Thrones kind of death where you’re like, there’s no way they would kill this person. But maybe I was foolish to think that a patient waiting for a new heart would survive.

Insecure airs Tuesdays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic/NOW TV in the UK and is available on HBO in the US