How NeverHaveIEver's Maitreyi Ramakrishnan beat out 15,000 actors to land the lead in Netflix's new series
Enter Ramakrishnan, who was one of more than 15,000 aspiring actors to audition. But the young Canadian actor tells“My best friend was the one who actually saw the tweet and she screenshotted it and sent it to me,” Ramakrishnan recalls. “I’m lying on my couch, ready to take a nice afternoon nap. … I remember feeling exhausted, but I was like, ‘Okay, let’s do it,’ just because I honestly only wanted to hang out with my best friend.
And equally important for Ramakrishnan to landing her first starring role is the chance to take a major step forward in small-screen representation by presenting a teenage South Asian girl in a lead role, especially since she identifies Kaling as one of the only South Asian women she saw on screen growing up.
Loosely based on her own experience growing up as a first-generation Indian American girl, Kaling underlined the importance of the representation that the series promotes“We see a certain kind of Indian actor all the time in auditions… Our show is about a Tamil Indian girl, and typically they’re South Indians and they’re dark-skinned,” she said. “I felt lucky to be able to do a show about an Indian nerd who’s also badly behaved, to show that because I’m deeply familiar with it.
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