“Please include that Maitreyi Ramakrishan was not just offered this role,” she says, her almighty finger pointing hard at my notebook. “Maitreyi Ramakrishnan worked!”
For some fans, who were eager to see Devi go to college, Best of the Best might serve as a suitable replacement for a continuation of the show, which ended in 2023 after four seasons. The movie reunites Ramakrishnan with one of her Never Have I Ever directors, Lena Khan, and co-choreographer Joya Kazi, who appeared in its first season, performing a Bollywood-style routine to the song “Nagada Sang Dhol.” In that scene, Kazi fluidly blended India's traditional Kathak dance with the swirling and romantic poses choreographed specifically for the big screen in Mumbai. That fusion, in a nutshell, is what Bollywood dance is all about.
Ramakrishnan and Minjah behind the scenes of the film —Courtesy of Netflix
We’re at dinner, discussing Ramakrishnan’s leap from leading a TV show to carrying a movie, a conversation we will pick up again a week later on a Zoom call with Minhaj. I meet up with Ramakrishnan at East Tea Can, a restaurant in her Mississauga neighbourhood, west of Toronto. She orders the cardamom black tea for us to share but insists she could finish off the entire pot by herself, and introduces me to mana’eesh, a stone-baked Middle Eastern pizza served with minced beef and lamb.
The latter is played by Priyanka Kedia, a fresh-faced Indian-American actor originally from the Bay area, who joined Best of the Best after graduating from NYU and catching a breakthrough part in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Her Anjali is the more poised social butterfly to the headstrong and rebellious Maya, their lifelong relationship tested when they both make the school’s esteemed Bollywood dance team and must jockey for parts while adjusting to campus life, rigorous academics, and new relationships. Their story draws from Minhaj and co-writer Venkataramanujam’s own college experiences.
Kedia and Ramakrishnan —Courtesy of NetflixDespite, Minhaj’s confidence in her, Ramakrishnan auditioned to reassure the whole team she was ready to transition from the snappy sitcom pacing of Never Have I Ever to the more considered emotional stakes of a feature film.
Minhaj is at his parent’s home in Sacramento, dressed in a blue and white baseball jersey. He’s immediately heartened to see my daughter’s bedroom, where I set up shop, in the background, pointing out the kids’ toys scattered on the floor around him. He pulls out framed photos of baby Hasan, clearly taken at some department store photo studio. The space feels familiar, if only because you could immediately imagine it filled with the characters he’s intimately described in his semi-autobiographical standup specials like Homecoming King and The King’s Jester.
Minhaj on the set of Best of the Best —Courtesy of NetflixLong before they met, Ramakrishnan was a huge fan of Patriot Act, a Netflix series in which Minhaj wielded punchlines and PowerPoint presentations to unpack politics and the perils of unchecked capitalism.
“And you were in full costume, right? You were dressed as Princess Leia or something like that?”
“Wait wait,” Minhaj says, shrinking.
“You had a full hood.”
“It was a karate gi meets Obi-Wan Kenobi up top.”
A fusion of many styles of dance
One of the more traditional dance sequences in Best of the Best —Courtesy of NetflixDuring weekly script sessions, Ramakrishnan would join Khan, Minhaj, and Venkataramanujam to share her input on drafts, and her character. These workshops would come at the end of the day for Ramakrishnan, who had a jam-packed training schedule to ensure she could convincingly play the part of a teen who’s been dancing all her life.
She was in her nerves about signing on to do a dance movie and potentially misrepresenting a community that she admires. “Dancers are no joke,” she says. But she says her mother offered the objective perspective she needed to face the job: “You read the script. You don’t need to be a great dancer. You just need to be good at seven dances.”
“I got to witness so many great talents,” she says. “I noticed the dancers that have this sparkle. There’s many that can nail the choreo, be on time with the counts, understand musicality, do the trick and the flip. But then there’s some dancers that can do it all in a way that makes an audience member, who has never danced before in their life, want to get up and dance with them, because you’re as intimidated and impressed by their dancing as you are welcomed and invited.”
Maya and Anjali auditioning for the competitive team —Courtesy of NetflixThe real-life sister dance duo Poonam and Priyanka Shah went viral a decade ago, performing butterflies and splits to the Bollywood song Ramta Jogi, taking their “Bfusion” routines from the collegiate circuit to the internet. In recent years, French-Tamil dancer Usha Jey broke the internet busting moves in a saree to Lil’ Wayne. These children of South Asian immigrants have been using fusion dance to broker a new cultural identity for themselves, with one foot in their ancestral lands and another in the place they call home.
“The beautiful thing that we wanted to do in this film,” says Minhaj, “is to take all of these things that make our identity and create something new with it.” He turns his attention to the varied identities spread across South Asia. “This is a rare opportunity where all of us from the diaspora can reconcile a lot of paradoxes that we couldn’t necessarily participate in if we were to do this film in India. There are all these other social, political and language barriers that separate Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. They become sequestered to their own cinema. In the States, all of that becomes kind of irrelevant.”
Maya and Anjali bring the moves to a frat party —Courtesy of Netflix
The filmmakers also accounted for Ramakrishnan, and the very specific Eelam Tamil identity she brings to the film, with all its fraught political connotations. When Maya introduces herself at one point, she says, “I'm Tamil. My family's from Sri Lanka.” The wording is precise. Ramakrishnan’s family is not, for instance, from Tamil Nadu in India, like Devi’s in Never Have I Ever. Nor do they identify as Sri Lankan. The state, which her family fled, stands accused of perpetrating a genocide against the Eelam Tamil population in 2009, after a 25-year civil war. For Ramakrishnan’s family, calling themselves Sri Lankan would be akin to a Palestinian identifying as Israeli.
Ramakrishnan has never shied away from discussing her identity and that history, and how both have shaped her. As a child, she joined her activist parents at protests in Toronto, calling for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Sri Lanka. She kept that spirit alive last year, at a “No Tyrants” rally in Vancouver, holding up a sign that said, “Never Have I Ever Thought Genocide Was OK."
Ramakrishnan performing a Kuthu dance at a frat party —Courtesy of NetflixShe likens Kuthu to Bhangra, which started as a dance for Punjab farmers, and is now a common sight at Indian weddings. The best place to learn both Bhangra and Kuthu? “At the function,” she says. Regarding Bhangra, “You learn it at the wedding. You learn it with the vibes. You get the beat in your shoulders and you're going.” As for Kuthu: “It’s at whatever banquet hall birthday party, for some 2-year-old kid who will never remember any of this, because he’s passed out in the corner while all the uncles and aunties are going off on the dance floor.”
A grand and meaningful finale
Maya (Ramakrishnan) in the film's final dance sequence —Courtesy of NetflixMinhaj also says that he and Venkataramanujam leaned into Ramakrishnan’s identity for the film’s spectacular finale, which plays out on a stage decorated like a museum, a playground of colonial artifacts. The climactic dance number, according to Minhaj, is meant to inhabit and challenge the South Asian literary discourse on colonial reparations. Did you expect anything less from the duo behind Patriot Act?
Minhaj questions whether such a symbolic reparation is useful, especially when it could sow further division in a region torn apart over centuries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan all lay claim to the diamond of obscure origin, which, as Minhaj points out, could just be an anchor tying a new generation down to a complicated colonial history as opposed to encouraging us to flourish.
I won’t spoil how, but it’s Ramakrishnan, as Maya, who steps up to embody what Minhaj has in mind as the way forward.
“Maitreyi is the actor for this moment because she comes from very special cloth. Her parents are incredible activists and academics. She understands her political and social place in history and in time. It only feels right that she's the lead of our film, and the voice of what is new and what is to come.”
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