Avantika Vandanapu Wants the Horror, the Romance and Everything In Between

A few days before speaking with A Shot, Avantika Vandanapu went to a wedding where someone asked her how her “extracurricular” was going. The extracurricular in question was acting. “It’s my full-time job,” she says, amused. “It pays all my bills and is definitely not my extracurricular anymore.”

By this point, Vandanapu has starred in Mean Girls, worked with Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, and Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, led Hulu’s Not Suitable For Work, and established the beginnings of a horror résumé. Still, she understands where the question comes from. “It takes a lot for immigrant families to acknowledge the arts as a legitimate career,” she admits. Her parents were different. They took her ambitions seriously long before acting became her full-time job. 

Acting may no longer be an extracurricular, but it is only one part of what Vandanapu wants to do. Right now, there are several possibilities competing for her attention. She is considering returning to Columbia University, where she studies cultural anthropology, while simultaneously feeling the pull back towards Indian cinema, the industry where she first began acting. Ideally, she would do both. 

Horror, it turns out, is Vandanapu’s favourite genre — and her taste runs deep. She loves The Babadook, Hereditary and Talk to Me, among most, if not all, things horror. Now, Vandanapu wants back into horror badly enough that she has a title in mind for herself. “I don’t quite feel like a scream queen yet,” she says cheekily.

“But I would love to officially be touted as such.” 

There was, as it turns out, already an opportunity to do exactly that. At the time of our conversation, reports were linking Vandanapu to the upcoming season of American Horror Story, though she was determined not to give anything away. “I can’t say anything,” she said when asked about the rumours. Since then, her casting in Season 13 has been confirmed.

What she was far more willing to talk about was how much she loves the series. “I loved Coven. I loved Asylum,” she says. “It’s such a great show. It’s also one of a kind. Nothing like it exists in the zeitgeist.” She also holds an admiration for the revolving cast that has defined the anthology over the years. “They always bring out the craziest people, and so it’s always exciting, at least growing up, to have watched every season and to be like, ‘Oh my God, of course they brought in this legend.’” Now, Vandanapu gets to join that revolving door herself.

The list of filmmakers Vandanapu hopes to work with is appropriately wide-ranging: the Daniels, Nancy Meyers and Chloé Zhao are all on it, alongside two giants of Indian cinema, Sanjay Leela Bhansali and S. S. Rajamouli, the filmmaker behind RRR. She is also preparing to add another title to the list: writer. Vandanapu is working on her first romantic film, built around something she has long wanted to see more of onscreen: South Asian characters who are allowed to simply be romantic leads. 

While nervous about writing for the first time, she admits, it doesn’t appear to be stopping her. Somewhere later in our conversation, while talking about the best advice she has ever received, she puts it succinctly: “Ready isn’t a feeling; it’s a decision you make.” 

Her roles have been just as varied. There was Karen Shetty in Mean Girls, a character whose South Indian identity she was adamant should exist without becoming her entire storyline. There was Tarot and Pretty Lethal, which took her into horror, and most recently Abby in Not Suitable For Work, a character routing the strange purgatory between college and adulthood while trying to break into New York’s fashion industry. Hulu recently decided not to move forward with a second season, a decision that was met with disappointment from fans who had hoped to see more of Abby. But fans might not have to say goodbye to Abby just yet; Warner Bros. Television reportedly plans to shop the series to other potential homes.

Whether or not Abby gets another chapter, the world Vandanapu inhabited with her was a particularly fun one. In Hulu’s Not Suitable For Work, she plays an ambitious young assistant trying to build a career in celebrity styling in New York, a world of luxurious clothes, demanding clients and the kind of last-minute fashion emergencies that require schlepping garment bags onto the subway. The series plays much of that chaos for comedy, but Vandanapu is asked how much of it is actually exaggerated, her answer is not particularly reassuring.

“I would never accuse my stylist of doing me dirty like that,” she says, referring to a scene in which Abby’s boss suggests showing a client one great outfit followed by a series of deliberately terrible ones. “But I would not put it past certain people.”

Vandanapu is careful to point out that she has never been privy to the internal politics of a stylist’s job. The rest of it, though? Stylists schlepping garment bags on the subway, scrambling to source last-minute looks for A-list clients and the politics between talent and brands— that all feels close enough to reality that she isn’t willing to rule anything out. “Hollywood is full of politics,” she tells A Shot. “Stylists definitely push clothes for campaigns and to get clients and actors deals with brands.”

If Abby’s professional life required Vandanapu to step into a world adjacent to her own, her wardrobe gave her an opportunity to invent someone a little different. Costume designer and “New York style legend”, as Avantika puts it, Eric Daman — the man behind the clothes of Gossip Girl and a veteran of Sex and the City — developed Abby’s eclectic wardrobe, but Vandanapu came in with one very specific request: hoops. “I don’t wear hoops usually in my day-to-day life,” she reveals.

“But I think girls who wear hoops are really cool.” 

It’s an endearingly simple piece of character logic: Abby is a hoops girl because Vandanapu thinks hoops girls are cool. Daman also gave her free rein over another small part of Abby’s visual identity. He laid out a selection of necklaces and told her to choose wisely; whichever pieces she picked would follow Abby through the season. The result is a wardrobe that can be eccentric and experimental while still containing the little repetitions real people have — the same necklaces, the same jackets, the pieces you reach for without thinking. 

Abby may have given Vandanapu the chance to play inside the world of celebrity styling, but Not Suitable For Work also brought her back to someone who had been part of her own story long before the series existed: Mindy Kaling. Kaling is, according to Vandanapu, one of her “favorite people on the planet.” Their relationship began years before Not Suitable For Work, with something less glamorous than a Hollywood set: a DM from a 17-year-old Vandanapu, a French restaurant in an LA strip-mall parking lot, her father waiting in his car nearby, and a plate of snails.

Vandanapu had reached out to Kaling online, hoping for little more than the possibility of meeting someone she already admired. Somehow, the message made it through, and Kaling agreed to lunch. “I remember my dad had driven me there and sat 200 feet away in his car,” she recalls. Meanwhile, Vandanapu was sitting with one of her heroes, trying escargot for the first time. “Mindy fed me snails for the first time.”

It is a strangely ordinary setting for the beginning of a relationship that would eventually come full circle professionally. Years later, Not Suitable For Work would reunite them, with Kaling producing. By then, the teenager nervously sending a DM had become someone Kaling was bringing into a project of her own.

Vandanapu has a rule about experiences like this now: “Never meet your heroes unless they’re Mindy Kaling.” Fortunately, Kaling isn’t the only exception. Working with Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels has left Vandanapu with a surprisingly optimistic view of what can happen when the people you grow up admiring become colleagues. “In the age of AI and technology, I really respect older filmmakers, producers and showrunners who are hell-bent on championing young voices and extending the table for them,” she shares. What she seems to value most is not simply their success, but their willingness to make room for people coming up behind them. 

It’s somewhere in the middle of talking about Kaling that Vandanapu suddenly clocks the date — and, with it, something she has apparently forgotten. It’s Kaling’s birthday. “I’m gonna text her right after this interview,” she exclaims, horrified and laughing. “I’m clearly a terrible employee. You caught me red-handed.”

The realization somehow sends the conversation from Kaling’s birthday to her birth chart. Vandanapu, it turns out, is very much an astrology person. “Love, love, love, love astrology,” she says, although she is quick to point out that she doesn’t exactly buy the idea of eight billion people fitting neatly into 12 archetypes. Still, Kaling does strike her as distinctly Cancerian: emotional, sensitive and empathetic. “I think her external persona sort of radiates the sun,” she says. “But as someone who knows her personally, I feel like she is sort of also the moon.”

If Kaling is one person Vandanapu has gotten to know beyond the public image, Not Suitable For Work had her thinking about how those images are constructed in the first place. She has watched fashion become increasingly inseparable from the machinery of Hollywood itself. “I’ve been faulted frequently by my friends for overdressing for events or not paying attention to the dress code,” she admits sheepishly.   

The actress views fashion and Hollywood as increasingly joined at the hip. Vandanapu misses, at least in theory, the era when someone could arrive at an event in a T-shirt and jeans and somehow still look cool. Today, every appearance can be photographed, posted, dissected and turned into content before the night is even over.  She finds this constant scrutiny a bit unfortunate, especially since the main event is supposed to be the artistic work itself.

Still, she is fascinated by how fashion has changed the way films are marketed. Modern press tours now stretch a film’s visual universe far past the theater walls, using fashion to build genuine hype long before opening night. She points to Zendaya and Margot Robbie, as well as Dakota Johnson’s personal approach to dressing, as examples of stars whose fashion generates a conversation of its own. “It is a portal into another visual reality of the film,” Vandanapu says. “I 100% think it’s true.”

She knows that feeling intimately. Years before she was regularly appearing on best-dressed lists, at 16 years old, she arrived at a speakeasy wearing a gown. Everyone else, she remembers, seemed effortlessly chic in little black dresses and cocktail attire. She was alone, and she knew no one. Surrounded by impossibly chic people she didn’t know, tears began to well in her eyes. 

The room was dark enough that nobody could see the tears streaming down her face. Then, from across the room, she noticed someone looking at her. It was Law Roach. He didn’t walk over. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He simply pointed at her, snapped his fingers, gave her a chef’s kiss and kept walking. “And that was all he did,” Vandanapu says. “My tears instantly dried up.” 

Being seen can do strange things to you. Sometimes it takes nothing more than a chef’s kiss from Law Roach to make you feel like you belong in a room. Other times, millions of strangers can look directly at you and decide they know exactly who you are. Vandanapu has experienced both.

In 2024, her name became attached to Disney’s live-action Tangled after an online rumor claimed she was being considered to play Rapunzel. It was never an announcement from Vandanapu, but that quickly became irrelevant. The possibility of a South Asian actress playing the famously blonde Disney princess was enough to set off an ugly wave of online discourse, much of it directed at Vandanapu herself.

Ask her about it now, though, and she seems less interested in litigating the rumor than in the strange confidence with which the internet discusses an industry it cannot actually see. “The more time I spend in this industry, the more I realize that people actually have no idea what’s going on inside,” she tells me. There are conversations audiences never hear about, stories that may be strategically planted and, occasionally, something that is quite literally just “someone on Twitter (now X) going ham and going crazy.” 

For a while, keeping up with all of it made her want to correct the record. She jokes that consuming enough misinformation about herself could turn her into the kind of person who starts a Substack solely to debunk it. “I’ve sort of, one, stopped reading.  Two, let it roll off my back.” 

There is surprising compassion about the way Vandanapu talks about people who have said cruel things about her online. Rather than imagining them as a faceless mob, she tries to imagine the person sitting behind the screen, with a life considerably bigger than whatever casting controversy has temporarily consumed their timeline.

“There’s no way my potential fan casting is the biggest problem plaguing you right now,” she says. Maybe they’re worried about paying their car insurance. Maybe they don’t know what they’re eating tomorrow. Maybe they’re annoyed they haven’t worked out enough that week. “I try to humanize them,” she reasons. “In the grand scheme of things, though, it actually, fundamentally, makes no difference to me.” 

Humanizing someone, however, is not the same thing as handing them power. “They don’t pay my bills. They don’t fuel my love for this job. They don’t fuel my love for this art,” she asserts. “They’re completely separate entities from it.” And when we inevitably ask the question, the internet would like answered — whether she ever actually auditioned for Tangled— Vandanapu knows better than to give us one.

What she does offer is a different way of looking at the obsession surrounding adaptations in the first place. Audiences, she thinks, have begun treating new interpretations of beloved stories as though something is being taken away from them. “The original always exists,” she declares. “No one’s taking away the original Tangled from you.” 

It is especially strange to her at a moment when studios remain so reliant on existing intellectual property. “Original stories are dying out,” she comments on this day and age. If Hollywood insists on returning to the same stories, Vandanapu would at least rather watch someone do something unexpected with them. But mostly, she thinks we could all stand to care a little less.

“People need to care a little bit more about the problems in the real world.” 

It would be an easy sentiment to dismiss as perspective gained after surviving an internet pile-on. Except Vandanapu has already shown that she is willing to speak about the real world when doing so carries considerably higher stakes than a casting rumor.

Years ago, Vandanapu applied to Harvard and didn’t get in. She can’t quite remember whether it was an outright rejection or a waitlist, and insists she wasn’t particularly devastated either way. New York had always been the dream, and Columbia was where she wanted to be. Then Harvard invited her back.

Vandanapu was named South Asian Person of the Year by the university’s South Asian Association, an honor she is quick to clarify came from the student organization rather than Harvard itself. If there was a triumphant rejected-by-Harvard-then-honored-by-Harvard narrative to be constructed from the moment, she seems almost determined not to indulge it. “If I’m being honest, it felt a little preemptive,” she admits. “I was like, ‘I literally have done nothing in my life to deserve this honor.’”

What mattered more was who had chosen to recognize her: South Asian students around her own age. “They know who I am. They recognize me,” she remembers thinking. But when Vandanapu stepped up to accept the award, she used the moment to direct that attention elsewhere. She dedicated it to the people of Gaza. Vandanapu was aware that speaking so openly about Palestine could come with professional and public consequences. Was she afraid of them? “Yes and no,” she answers.

There was fear. Not necessarily because she doubted what she wanted to say, but because she knows by now that even the things that feel most fundamental can become something for strangers to argue over. Then she starts talking about her parents. They came to the United States as immigrants, she explains, and spent their adult lives existing as a minority while building lives and communities of their own. Vandanapu sees herself as part of that continuum, and with it comes a responsibility that, to her, extends beyond geography. 

“What are we as a people? What are we as a diaspora if we can’t stand up for our children and our people everywhere?” she expresses. Her answer doesn’t stop at Gaza; she also speaks about children being targeted in Tehran and India. For Vandanapu, the principle is less about choosing the safest issue to attach her name to than refusing to allow professional self-preservation to become more important than empathy.

“I don’t think any fear of backlash will, I hope, ever outweigh my sort of shared empathy and shared pain for that,”

“We are not united as a people if we can’t at least agree on something that seems so fundamental.” she says. And perhaps that is the more interesting distinction in the way Vandanapu talks about having a public voice. She has learned to care considerably less about what strangers think of her, without allowing that detachment to become an excuse to care less about everyone else.

For all the outside voices she has learned to tune out, there are certain things Vandanapu has carried with her for years. One of them is an image she first drew when she was eight or nine years old. It is a drawing she made as a child: a brontosaurus stretching its impossibly long neck towards a tiny butterfly hovering just beyond its reach. She still wants to get it tattooed someday. 

“That’s how I always felt growing up,” she bares. “I feel like I’m given all the tools to get it, and it’s right there, but I can’t.” There is something almost comical about the image: an enormous dinosaur, seemingly built to reach great heights, unable to get to something as small and weightless as a butterfly. 

Asked what she would be if she were a single shot in a film, Vandanapu chooses a strangely poignant one. She remembers first encountering a dinosaur in the original Jurassic Park, but it is a later image from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that has stayed with her most: the dinosaur in the distance as Isla Nublar burns, slowly disappearing into flames and ash.

It is the finality of the image that stays with her: the brontosaurus alone in the distance, watching the only world it knows disappear around it. “You’re born alone and you die alone, right?” Avantika doesn’t say it sadly. If anything, solitude is something she has learned to enjoy. “It’s a beautiful sentiment; I really enjoy the time I spend alone,” she shares.

Perhaps the more revealing image, though, is still the butterfly. At eight years old, Vandanapu drew something that she couldn’t quite reach. More than a decade later, she still seems most energised by whatever remains slightly beyond her grasp. The things she is reaching for have simply gotten bigger.

Interview @ahmedhathoutt
Art Director @halliegluk
Lighting Tech @joshuadesurephotos
Stylist @sebastienhohl_
Hair @rachellitahair
Mua @robertti
Nails @allhailthynail