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Best of The Best actor Priyanka Kedia on Indian representation in Hollywood: Our identity is not the punchline
Priyanka Kedia, recently seen in the Netflix film Best of The Best, talks about Indian representation in Hollywood and learning Bharatnatyam for the film
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For Priyanka Kedia, South Asian representation has moved beyond simply being visible on screen. The 24-year-old British actor of Indian origin stars alongside Never Have I Ever fame Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in Netflix’s Best of the Best, a coming-of-age comedy set in the fiercely competitive world of collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance. Written by comedian Hasan Minhaj and his long-time collaborator Prashanth Venkataramanujam, and directed by Lena Khan, the film draws on its writers’ own experiences of growing up in the South Asian diaspora in the US.
What matters to Priyanka Kedia is that its characters are not reduced to that identity. “We all have this common experience of growing up seeing ourselves represented as the butt of the joke. To have a film where our identity is not the joke, it’s not the punchline, but just who we are and the things that we go through have nothing to do with it, that’s important,” she tells us.
Watch the entire chat with Priyanka Kedia and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan here:
The actor, also known for Everything to Me (2024) and Disclosure Day, adds, “That’s not the central part of who we are as people. We’re allowed to be messy, we’re allowed to be great, we’re allowed to be silly, we’re allowed to be complex and that is really important. And the joy and the comedy it has is universal. It’s not just, ‘Oh, you’re Indian, haha’.”
Dance is not merely a backdrop to the story, but the world through which its ideas of culture, competition and identity play out. Kedia trained in Bharatanatyam for the film, with the team paying close attention to getting even the smallest details right. “We went through a lot of intense training. I danced a little bit growing up but neither of us (Her and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) are classically trained, but we had an amazing choreography team. We had someone who was watching our mudras, with a hawklike focus to make sure that everything felt accurately represented because that was really important to us. It was a really beautiful experience,” she shares.
