The dance duets in Best of the Best had to look like two friends who knew how to catch each other. Getting there took more than learning the steps. Priyanka Kedia and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan trained together for months before the Netflix film, working through long practice days, difficult lifts and the kind of trust no choreographer can simply hand to two actors.
Kedia plays Anjali and Ramakrishnan plays Maya, friends whose bond is tested as they pursue a dance competition. Director Lena Khan put movement at the heart of the story, so their friendship needed to make sense both in conversation and while they were performing. The actors spoke about that work as the film arrived on Netflix September 18.
What did the training feel like?
In a Netflix interview, they described a months-long preparation period that could stretch to 14-hour days. Kedia separately told Who What Wear that an intensive early phase ran for roughly two and a half months, with eight-hour classes six days a week at the start. Those are descriptions of different parts of the preparation, not two rival accounts of a single timetable.
The classes covered different dance styles. Kedia said she was bruised every day. That may be the least glamorous detail in a film about making performance look effortless, but it explains why the duets feel earned. The pair worked with choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman and had to learn how the other person moved under pressure.
The hardest part was trusting each other
“We physically were leaning on each other and holding each other up in these duets,” Kedia told Netflix. She also learned a difficult flip with co-star Ankur Rathee. Ramakrishnan, who said she had not danced before taking on the movie, performed part of her own slide stunt. The point is not that every move was effortless; it is how much work went into letting the characters move as a team.
A wedding sequence added a different challenge for Kedia. She told Who What Wear that the real lehenga she wore weighed about ten pounds. Dancing in a costume like that is different from repeating a routine in practice clothes. On screen it is part of the celebration; behind the scenes it was another physical task to solve.
Why does that matter to the story?
Anjali begins as a rule-follower, while Maya brings a different energy into their partnership. A dance contest could have reduced them to two people counting beats. Instead, the preparation helped the actors find a shared physical language. When they hold each other up, the movement also tells the audience something about the friendship.
Kedia’s path to this lead role was hardly preordained. She recalled working as a barista at a cafe where Hasan Minhaj was a partner when she booked the part, and she had already admired him. Minhaj is in the cast. That personal detail does not replace the film’s story, but it shows how much changed for the actor between those shifts and the premiere.
Best of the Best is now on Netflix. Viewers can see the final performances without needing to count every hour behind them. Yet the actors’ interviews make the film’s central friendship easier to appreciate: it was rehearsed in studios, through bruises and in the moments when one person had to trust the other to catch her.
For the film’s cast and premise, see our Best of the Best movie page.
