For Priyanka Kedia, meaningful South Asian representation in Hollywood is no longer simply about seeing Indian faces on screen. The 24-year-old British actor of Indian origin says the bigger change comes when those characters are allowed to exist as complete individuals without their ethnicity becoming the joke.
Kedia, who stars alongside Never Have I Ever actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in Netflix’s Best of the Best, has reflected on growing up watching South Asian characters frequently reduced to stereotypes and comic devices. Her latest film, she said, offered a different approach by allowing its Indian characters’ personalities and relationships to drive the story.
‘Allowed to be complex’
“We all have this common experience of growing up seeing ourselves represented as the butt of the joke,” Kedia said in an interview with Hindustan Times.
For her, Best of the Best matters because its characters’ cultural identities are part of who they are without becoming their defining characteristic.
“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 said.
Kedia argued that representation also meant giving South Asian characters the same range of personalities, flaws and experiences routinely afforded to other characters.
“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,” she said.
The actor said the humour in the film was intended to work universally rather than rely on someone being Indian as the source of the joke.
Dance at heart of story
Directed by Lena Khan and written by comedian Hasan Minhaj and his long-time collaborator Prashanth Venkataramanujam, Best of the Best is a coming-of-age comedy set in the highly competitive world of collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance in the US.
The film follows best friends Maya, played by Ramakrishnan, and Anjali, played by Kedia, as they enter UCLA and join its competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team. The story uses their experiences with friendship, competition and dance to explore growing up within the South Asian diaspora.
For Kedia, ensuring that the dance itself was represented accurately was as important as getting the characters right.
Although she had danced while growing up, Kedia said neither she nor Ramakrishnan was classically trained. Preparing for the film therefore involved intensive training, including Bharatanatyam.
“We went through a lot of intense training,” she said, recalling how the choreography team paid close attention even to the performers’ mudras.
Kedia said a member of the team watched their hand gestures with “hawklike focus” to ensure they were accurately performed. She described the training process as demanding but “a really beautiful experience”.
Beyond old stereotypes
The film arrives amid a broader shift in the way South Asian characters are being written in Western films and television, with actors increasingly pushing for stories in which ethnicity does not have to be the central conflict.
Ramakrishnan, who emerged as one of the most recognisable young South Asian actors in Hollywood after Never Have I Ever, has similarly spoken about the evolution of representation and the need to move beyond familiar cultural stereotypes.
Best of the Best approaches that conversation through a world rarely given mainstream Hollywood treatment — competitive collegiate Bollywood dance. The film draws partly from the experiences of Minhaj and Venkataramanujam growing up in the South Asian diaspora in the US.
For Kedia, whose earlier credits include Everything to Me and Disclosure Day, the significance lies in allowing Indian characters to occupy the centre of a mainstream coming-of-age story while remaining flawed, funny and complicated.
Rather than removing their cultural identity, she said, the objective is to reach a point where being Indian is simply one element of a character — and no longer the punchline.