Maitreyi Ramakrishnan

Watch Maitreyi Ramakrishnan's face in Best of the Best (2026), not the dancing. As Maya she has decided how the year will go, and every time the year disagrees the disagreement lands on her features about half a second before the line arrives to deal with it. She talks fast, but the face is faster. It is a small thing and it is the whole performance, and it is why the film's best scenes are two young women in a rehearsal room with the music off, working out who is in charge.

The habit was there from the start. She was found in 2019 through an open casting call, some fifteen thousand applicants deep, with no professional work behind her, and given the lead in Never Have I Ever (2020–2023): four seasons of Devi Vishwakumar, a teenager certain of everything and wrong about most of it. Casting directors talked about her timing and about an unpolished delivery, and those are the same quality; she does not smooth a line before she says it. There was voice work after that, including Turning Red (2022), then a move into live-action film with supporting parts in Slanted and Freakier Friday (both 2025), before Lena Khan, who has now directed her twice, gave her a film to carry alongside Priyanka Kedia.

What we have seen of the supporting work is not much, and that is the problem with it. In Freakier Friday she plays Ella, a client of Lohan's Anna, and she is in it too briefly to register. The same complaint was made of Slanted, where the part drew notice and the running time did not. Films have so far used her the way a sitcom uses the neighbour: a burst of energy in the doorway, then gone.

Best of the Best is the first time the energy has somewhere to go, and we liked her more in it than we expected to, mostly because Khan lets Kedia's quieter Anjali push back. Ramakrishnan is funny on her own; she is better opposite someone who has stopped agreeing with her, because the half-second gap between her face and her mouth suddenly matters. When the two fall out the script gives both a case, and Ramakrishnan plays a girl who knows she is not quite right and keeps talking anyway. We found ourselves watching her rather than the choreography, and were faintly annoyed each time the editing cut away from her to chop up another number.

The caveat is the obvious one. Devi, Maya and Ella are the same girl at different sizes: confident, quick, and due a correction. That is a fine thing to be good at in your early twenties. The interesting film will be the one that casts her as someone slow, or someone who is right, and finds out whether the face still gets there first.