Maitreyi Ramakrishnan on Best of the Best and Bharatanatyam

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan has built her career on characters who feel specific, restless and fully alive. In Netflix’s Best of the Best, she steps into a new kind of physical and cultural challenge. Playing Maya, a young woman navigating friendship, ambition and identity inside the high-pressure world of collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance, required her to train intensively in forms she had only briefly encountered before. In an exclusive conversation, the actor spoke about how learning Bharatanatyam helped her enter her character’s world more deeply and why the experience felt like a genuine gift.

A Role That Demanded More Than Dialogue

Best of the Best, which began streaming on Netflix in mid-September 2026, follows childhood friends Maya and Anjali as they join a competitive university dance team and discover that the path to a national title is far more complicated than they imagined. Directed by Lena Khan and written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, the film blends comedy, friendship drama and large-scale dance sequences rooted in South Asian movement traditions.

For Ramakrishnan, the project represented a departure from the verbal agility and emotional sharpness that defined her breakthrough role in Never Have I Ever. This time the performance had to live in the body as much as in the face and voice. The choreography drew from multiple styles, including classical forms, and demanded stamina, precision and cultural fluency.

Returning to Bharatanatyam

Ramakrishnan has been open about the limits of her earlier dance experience. She did not grow up attending regular classes. Her formal exposure to Bharatanatyam amounted to roughly one year as a younger student. Returning to the classical form as an adult, under the pressure of a major film production, proved both difficult and illuminating.

“I didn’t grow up learning dance and going to classes except for my one year of Bharatanatyam. It was rough. It is insane,” she said, acknowledging the technical and historical depth of the art form. The training required her to rebuild strength, flexibility and muscle memory while absorbing the expressive vocabulary that Bharatanatyam carries—its precise geometry, rhythmic complexity and storytelling through gesture.

Rather than treating the dance work as mere preparation for camera-ready sequences, she approached it as a way of understanding Maya from the inside. The physical discipline and the cultural resonance of the form helped her inhabit a character whose life is organised around performance, competition and the negotiation of identity within a diaspora space.

The Gift of Immersion

What stayed with Ramakrishnan was not only the difficulty but the privilege of the process. She described the opportunity to acquire a demanding new skill and to be surrounded by highly accomplished creative collaborators as “a true gift” from the filmmakers and the streamer. The months of rehearsal and training allowed her to step fully into a world that would otherwise have remained external.

This perspective aligns with how she has spoken about acting more broadly. For her, one of the enduring rewards of the profession is the chance to live lives different from her own and to learn capabilities she would never otherwise develop. Great characters, she noted, remain an actor’s dream precisely because they open those unfamiliar rooms.

Beyond a Single Form

While Bharatanatyam formed an important part of her preparation, the overall training for Best of the Best was broader. Reports from the production describe an intensive multi-month boot camp that included classical, folk and contemporary techniques along with strength and conditioning work. Long studio days tested endurance as much as artistry. Ramakrishnan has previously described the process as transformative, noting that she finished the experience in the best physical shape of her life and with a new respect for the discipline required of professional dancers.

The film’s choreography itself reflects a layered approach to South Asian dance on screen. Rather than reducing “Bollywood” to a single flashy style, the sequences incorporate varied influences that mirror the mixed cultural backgrounds of the characters on the fictional university team. For an actor whose own background bridges Canada and Tamil roots, engaging with these forms carried personal as well as professional meaning.

Friendship at the Centre

Although the dance sequences provide the film’s spectacle, Ramakrishnan has emphasised that the emotional core remains the relationship between Maya and Anjali. The story uses the pressure of competition to test loyalty, ego and the evolving terms of a long friendship. Preparing the physical language of the characters also meant learning how to share space, weight and timing with her co-star Priyanka Kedia in ways that would read as lived-in rather than merely rehearsed.

That collaborative physical work reinforced the film’s thematic interest in how young women support and sometimes strain against one another while trying to define themselves.

Representation and Craft

Best of the Best arrives at a moment when South Asian stories in mainstream Western streaming continue to expand in range. Ramakrishnan’s involvement brings both recognisable star power and a commitment to specificity. By investing seriously in the dance training, including the classical component, she and the production avoid treating cultural forms as decorative backdrop. The movement becomes part of the characters’ interior lives and social world.

At the same time, the actor’s comments keep the focus on craft rather than symbolism alone. Learning Bharatanatyam was valuable because it deepened her access to the role, not simply because it checked a cultural box. That distinction matters. It suggests an approach to performance in which cultural material is treated as living technique rather than static identity marker.

Looking Forward

Ramakrishnan’s reflections on the film reveal an artist still energised by the fundamental exchange that acting offers: the chance to acquire new skills, to step into unfamiliar circumstances, and to chase the rare characters that feel inexhaustible. Best of the Best gave her an unusually physical version of that exchange. The sore muscles and the steep learning curve were real. So was the satisfaction of eventual fluency.

For audiences, the film offers comedy, friendship and the kinetic pleasure of well-executed group choreography. For the actor at its centre, it offered something quieter and more lasting: proof that the work of preparation can itself become a form of discovery. In learning to move with the precision and expressive weight of Bharatanatyam, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan found another way into her character—and another reminder of why she acts in the first place.

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