The demanding preparation behind the Best of the Best dance scenes has been detailed by stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia, who underwent months of intensive training for the Netflix film.
Ramakrishnan plays Maya and Kedia portrays her childhood best friend, Anjali, in director Lena Khan’s comedy. The pair join UCLA’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team, placing their friendship in a demanding new environment.
Best of the Best stars trained for months
Ramakrishnan, known for Never Have I Ever, said her preparation lasted four months and involved six dance classes a day, six days a week.
“I’m not someone who grew up playing a sport and I didn’t like sweating. So you can paint the picture of a Brown girl sweaty on the floor. Flat as a pancake, dying and dry heaving. That was me,” she told People.
Choreographer Joya Kazi said both leads progressed sufficiently to keep pace with the professional dancers. She praised the pair for making the greatest commitment during rehearsals, saying: “They’re the ones who worked the longest.”
The choreography was developed by Kazi alongside Makenzie Dustman and Phillip Chbeeb, with Khan insisting that each number should have its own identity while advancing the story.
Khan said she wanted the staging to reflect the emotional purpose of each scene. “I wanted us to go big—whether it was magic realism or elaborate set design—at one point we literally built a mountain on stage—to pull out whatever theme or feeling the story needed in that moment,” she said.
Kedia told Netflix Tudum that she was particularly proud of learning a difficult flip during a performance with co-star Ankur Rathee.
“I remember pulling that off for the first time and being like, ‘Whoa, I can do that. That’s crazy,’” she recalled.
Ramakrishnan also pushed to perform part of a demanding finale sequence herself. The move included a slide likened in the source material to a stunt from a Mission Impossible film and had initially been intended for doubles.
“I said, ‘Hey, if it doesn’t inconvenience anyone or time on set, I would love to just do this move myself because months ago I was never physically able to do this move. But now that I’ve trained my body to be able to do something like this, I’d like to do it,’” she said.
A portion of her stunt was included in the final cut. Best of the Best is now streaming on Netflix.
