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Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is deep into a passionate, hand-gesture led description of a scene in her favourite anime, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, when it occurs to me that she is, in many ways, describing herself. The answer comes in response to a deliberately open question: if she were a shot in a film, what would it look like? She thinks for a moment, considering whether she should choose a real scene or something entirely imagined, before the answer comes to her, and lights up her face in the process.
“I think people might be surprised to hear that this is something that I relate to. But in my heart of hearts, this is a character and scene that feels representative of my true self.”
The scene she’s talking about is a big one: the elf mage Frieren faces the demon Aura, who assumes that Frieren will be easy to overpower. The catch is that Frieren has been hiding just how powerful and multi-faceted she really is.
“It’s a moment where you’re like, oh my God, this is Frieren the Slayer! It’s beautiful.”
A similar feeling surrounds Ramakrishnan. We meet over Zoom, and I immediately feel underdressed when met with her immaculate tartan dress and professional junket set-up. I say as much, which she meets with a firm shake of her head. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be,” she reassures with a smile. I can’t help but feel the same way about her.
Known best for her breakout role as Devi in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, Ramakrishnan has become synonymous with a particular kind of performance: personality imbued characters that are at once funny and occasionally disastrous, and ultimately impossible not to root for. In her latest project, Best of the Best, she plays Maya, another version of that archetype – a 20-something year old who is ambitious, outspoken and unapologetically herself, all while carrying a much quieter sense of doubt underneath.
It’s this hidden vulnerability that intrigues Ramakrishnan, who talks about Maya with a certain fondness that one might use to talk about an old friend.
“She’s the kind of girl that takes the path less travelled in her ideas and her creativity, and sometimes that can be a little bit lonely. She can’t code switch, and that part I heavily relate to. I’ve never been good at turning off my personality. I can mute it down, but the core is always the same.”
The more we talk, the less I understand why anyone would expect Ramakrishnan to lessen what is an irrefutably sparkling disposition. She’s warm and witty and wholly honest with every answer, her innate care for her work and the characters that she plays laced within every word. It’s no surprise that the 24-year-old has met success so early in what will no doubt be a lengthy and notable career. Whether it’s on set or on Zoom, Ramakrishnan is exactly where she’s supposed to be.
But, like her reference to Frieren, there is more than meets the eye here. Throughout our half an hour conversation, we talk about everything from Hamilton (she had just seen Christopher Jackson make his return as George Washington to the Broadway production two days prior), to her love of gaming (she is a proud Nintendo ambassador), and the upcoming remake of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
One snoop of her Instagram confirms the latter: Ramakrishnan is a proud cosplayer, and various posts find her posing in front of a wall of gaming collectibles, ranging from Pokemon plushies to Minecraft swords. She also regularly streams on Twitch, where she has donned her community ‘The Maitriarchy’, where ‘it’s cool to care’. And care, she does.
That sense of care is the thread that runs most clearly through our conversation. Ramnakrishnan is enthusiastic about everything she talks about, but when the topic turns to representation, that enthusiasm becomes something more considered.
Born to Sri Lankan parents, Ramakrishnan grew up in the city of Mississauga in Ontario, Canada. Thanks to her stint in Never Have I Ever, she is now recognised as being one of the most prominent young South Asian faces in Western media, a mantle that she says is simultaneously carried with pride, and pressure.
“There is still that pressure to represent and make people feel seen,” she tells me. “Whether or not the character is explicitly South Asian, there is still that pressure.”
It’s a responsibility that she doesn’t shy away from, but one she has also had to learn to put into perspective. Ramakrishnan tells me that she came to a realisation towards the end of the first season of Never Have I Ever that she simply couldn’t represent everyone. It’s an obvious statement, perhaps, but one that seems to have offered a degree of freedom.
“I can only represent those who can relate to my life,” she says. “If you don’t relate or feel represented, that’s okay. As long as I’m not actively hurting you, that’s okay. I’m so sorry that’s the case, but I hope you find someone, if not already, that you feel represented by.”
It’s a particularly refreshing sentiment. Representation is so often spoken about in terms of obligation, as though every actor who breaks through previously unbroken barriers must somehow become a spokesperson for everyone who comes after them. But Ramakrishnan seems to have found a way to embrace the importance of that position, without allowing it to consume her.
“I do care a lot. I really give a shit about what I put out there. What a privilege and high honour it is to be able to have the power to represent. I think it’s really cool.”
It’s a sentiment that I wholly empathise with. Ramakrishnan clearly understands the significance of having begun her career with Devi, a character who has since become deeply meaningful to a generation of young South Asian viewers, while simultaneously recognising that the best way to continue that conversation is to allow herself to be seen on screen as more than one thing.
That philosophy extends to the characters she chooses. Whilst obviously interested in South Asian characters, she doesn’t want their ethnicity to become their entire personality. This is a feeling echoed by Korean-Canadian and Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams, who, when speaking to The Permanent Rain Press, explained that while he is perfectly happy for race to matter when it’s relevant to a role, he wants the freedom to play characters where being Asian isn’t part of the narrative at all.
When asked, Ramakrishnan echoes the same ideal.
“I don’t want the coolest thing about my character to be the fact that she’s South Asian, or that she’s Tamil, in the same way that I don’t want the coolest thing about my character to be the fact that she’s queer. She should have a personality first, and also be those things.”
It’s why her role in Best of the Best feels so significant to her. In a film about competitive collegiate Bollywood dancing, Maya’s identity matters to the story, but, as Ramakrishnan explains, her characterisation doesn’t stop there.
“Before she is South Asian, she is bullish. She’s confident, she’s insecure, she’s loud. She’s very poorly timed, and she is very, very honest.”
The longer we talk about Maya, the more I realise that Ramakrishnan talks about her as if she were a real person. She worked closely with director Lena Khan (who she describes as her “north star” throughout the process) to construct the character in her own way. “I can see all of my choices play out on screen,” she tells me. “You know exactly how Maya feels about every single thing going on around her.” Together, they talked through the character, before Ramakrishnan built her up through minute acting choices that an audience might not consciously register.
“I’m the kind of actor that likes to speak out and talk through the process,” she explains. “The mental state, the why, where is this coming from, how does this translate in her life? I made so many intentional decisions with Maya. Every line, every look, every breath I took, all of it was done with purpose.”
Ramakrishnan also took on a very intentional, and necessary, commitment to learning how to dance. In Best of the Best, Maya and her best friend Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) join a competitive Bollywood dance team in their freshman year at USC. The dancing, she explains, was something she had to learn from scratch.
“I never did dance classes,” she says, recalling one year of classical ballet when she was six. What she does have, in her own words, is “audacity and nerve.” She explains with a smile that she is the person who will happily throw herself into the centre of a dance circle, regardless of whether she actually knows what she’s doing. That fervor is something that had to become something considerably more disciplined in preparation for Best of the Best. For four months, she trained six days a week, taking six dance classes a day.
“I had no stamina when I started, but I knew that if I just dedicated myself, worked hard, and fully trusted the process of, alright, we’re here, we can’t go back now, this is happening, we can make this. I worked my butt off!”
It’s a process that, in the end, wasn’t just about learning choreography, but has changed the way Ramakrishnan understands her own body. She insists that her commitment to dancing has created an empowering sense of awareness of physical space, levelling up her confidence, particularly on red carpets and during photoshoots. I joke that maybe I should try the same, before she assures me with that charming smile again, that it might just change my life. Like most things that come out of her mouth, I’m inclined to believe her.
Ramakrishnan has a tendency to answer questions with the kind of honesty that makes it feel as though there is very little separation between the actor sitting on the other end of my screen and the person she’s describing. There’s no obvious media-trained distance, and even when discussing something as weighty as representation, it feels like chatting with a friend. She manages to make it feel conversational but personal, and of course, occasionally funny.
That ability to find humour in things is also central to her relationship with comedy. Best of the Best is, on the surface, a funny film. There are absurdist jokes (“He thinks Timothee Chalamet is a psyop”) and sharp one-liner moments that seem designed to catch the audience off guard. But underneath that comedy is a much more serious examination of girlhood, identity and the expectations placed on young women.
Ramakrishnan is particularly interested in the way that humour can make those conversations easier to have. When asked about these comedic moments, she’s quick to affirm how much she loves the genre. For her, comedy isn’t about making an audience laugh, but controlling the atmosphere of a room, knowing when to raise the energy and, perhaps more importantly, knowing when to take it away.
“Comedy done right can give you moments of levity and joy, while also knowing when and how to cut it so that you can make the air in the room drop. You give people a fun ride, and then they walk away and they’re like, wait, this is also hitting home.”
It’s an approach that Best of the Best understands instinctively. One minute Maya is delivering an outrageous line, and the next she is forced to sit with something much more uncomfortable. Ramakrishnan is very careful to differentiate between the two, particularly in the film’s quieter moments.
“There’s beauty in a pause,” she says. “You don’t have to undercut a serious, vulnerable moment with a joke just to make sure you keep the audience happy.”
It’s yet another example of something she keeps returning to throughout our conversation: the confidence of a comedic moment juxtaposed with the sensitivity of something more vulnerable, and how both can exist together, both on screen, and in real life.
When I ask Ramakrishnan what other genres she wants to explore, the conversation takes a devious and devilish turn.
“My big three are action, fantasy and horror or thriller,” she says, before adding with a determined, giddy grin: “I’d love to play a character where I can make the audience root for her, just to be absolutely betrayed. I want to betray some trust. Let me betray some trust!”
It’s a role I can see her in immediately. Dripping in blood and fighting for her life, yet loving every second of it. After years of playing characters who may make questionable decisions but remain fundamentally lovable, there would be something deliciously unexpected about seeing Ramakrishnan weaponise that inherent warmth against her audience.
Perhaps that is exactly why the Frieren scene she chooses at the end of our conversation feels so revealing, yet fitting. Frieren is a character that contains much more than meets the eye. She goes beyond people’s expectations of her, in a transformation that isn’t about becoming someone else, but allowing everyone else to finally see what was already there.
Ramakrishnan is quick to clarify that she isn’t saying she sees herself as an ancient elf mage capable of defeating demons (although, judging by her clear love for anime, it may be safe to assume that this is a fate that Ramakrishnan would not mind).
This is the most fitting way to understand where Ramakrishnan is in her career right now. The world already knows Devi, and they will soon get to know Maya. Audiences have seen the comedy, the chaos and the charisma of her characters, and fallen in love with them along the way. But there is clearly a lot more she wants to explore.
She wants to dance, and do horror, and play villains, but continue to make audiences laugh, and then make them uncomfortable. She wants to continue finding roles that allow her to surprise people, all without ever feeling the need to mute herself for the benefit of anyone else.
It’s an approach that she’s still learning how to embody.
“I know who I am,” she says of Maya, but it could just as easily be an apt description of herself. That doesn’t mean she never feels insecure, or feels that she fits into every room and every conversation. If anything, Ramakrishnan understands that knowing yourself so well can make those moments more difficult. But there is something empowering about refusing to confuse that discomfort with a need to change.
I’m already mourning our conversation by the time we’re told to wrap, but left smiling at the thought of everything I feel like she has gifted me to take away. It felt, at times, like a meeting of cosmic proportions: just two 20-something year olds exactly where they’re supposed to be.
There’s no demon, no magic and no thousand-year-old elf in Ramakrishnan’s life, but the underlying themes of her favourite anime ring true.
There is so much more to Ramakrishnan than we’ve seen, and she is more than ready to show us.
- Stylist @wilfordlenov
- Hair @capricetorres
- Mua @jordangiang for @armanibeauty at @opusbeauty
- Location @hollywoodland.forgotten
