Priyanka Kedia’s breakout role is a love letter to female friendship, South Asian American heritage, and what it takes to truly grow with the ones you love.
“Growing up, and even now, female friendship has been the core relationship in my life that things are built around,” Kedia says. “It’s one of the purest forms of love that exists.”
Kedia stars in the new Netflix coming-of-age, collegiate dance movie “Best of the Best,” alongside Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Hasan Minhaj. The film follows a pair of childhood friends, Anjali (Kedia) and Maya (Ramakrishnan), as they transition from high school to their freshman year at UCLA, showcasing the growing pains that come with new chapters.
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“We’re meeting the girls at an inflection point in their lives, in college when you kind of go into yourself and shed a lot of the things you grew up with. At this moment, are we going to grow apart or are we going to grow together?” Kedia says.
On the heels of a TikTok viral talent show blunder, Anjali and Maya are eager to embrace a new beginning and reinvent themselves with their newfound freedom on campus. Between Bollywood dance team performances, computer science courses, and anxiety-inducing social and dating dynamics, we see the duo challenge and recommit to one another.
“It just resonated so much and it feels so special to be platforming something that is prioritizing female friendship and that kind of love,” says the 24-year-old actor. “That’s how these girls have built their lives and now they’re coming to terms with what that looks like when your environment is changing and coming into yourself. It’s something everyone can relate to, and I don’t know why we don’t talk about it as much.”
Kedia shares that she felt frustrated with the lack of representation of friendship-centered love stories, where men aren’t the primary plot driver. For the two, relationships with men are merely peripheral to their friendship.
“Loving someone that much leaves you that much more open and vulnerable to being hurt and wounded,” Kedia says. “Both of them are making mistakes, no one is perfect, and I think that is also really important. They are both hurting each other, and they are both having these moments of looking inward and taking accountability.”
It’s not too far off from Kedia’s own life experience, having recently graduated from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in drama. Much like her character Maya, Kedia balanced pursuing the performing arts with a rigorous academic schedule.
“I feel so grateful to be here. This isn’t lost on me for a moment,” Kedia says. She graduated just a few years ago, and did her time working odd jobs while auditioning, “I was a barista, usher, babysitter, SAT tutor, and a camp counselor,” she says. “And I was doing regional theater that I was losing money doing, but for the love of the game. That’s what you end up in a basement in New Jersey doing, because you just want to be creating.”
One such odd job was working at her future costar Hasan Minhaj’s café, Kolkata Chai Co, in the East Village. One day Kedia was serving him a chai, and a few years later they were doing a chemistry read.
“I was pinching myself every day,” she says of her costars Minhaj and Ramakrishnan. “We have two people who have opened those doors in a really big way. They paved the way for a movie like this to even exist. Being South Asian is one thing. Being South Asian-American is a whole other identity that is its own thing. So to read a script that is so specifically South Asian-American was so special.”
Kedia has been performing since childhood, participating in Bollywood dance in her local theater, but for this role, she committed to two-and-a-half months of intense training to prepare for the professional-level choreography in the film.
“I grew up doing ballet, jazz and tap. I started taking acting classes when I was 9 and then I got really into theater in high school,” she says. “Performance and art have always been in my life. I know what an important role it plays in building community throughout your childhood.”
Looking ahead to her next projects, Kedia is excited to push her craft forward and tell stories from perspectives that deserve more nuanced representation.
“It means so much to have people thinking deeply about this work and it can be written off as a college comedy, but no, comedy is a vehicle to make truth more accessible,” she says. “I want to keep making work that challenges me and that I feel proud of.”