How Netflix’s Must-Watch Teen Comedy ‘Never Have I Ever’ Found Its Breakout Star

Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s new Netflix comedy, Never Have I Ever, could have easily been a drama. On paper, “Teenage girl processes her grief after the death of her father” does not exactly sound like a riot. But 18-year-old lead actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s performance sells it. As Devi Vishwakumar, she seamlessly toggles between the furious angst, naive optimism, and unrelenting horniness that tend to go hand in hand with being a teenage girl. Even when Devi is at her worst—and the lows are really pretty ugly—it’s impossible not to laugh with her and, perhaps more importantly, root for her.

But before Never Have I Ever, Ramakrishnan had only appeared in a high school production of Chicago.

Fisher, who co-executive produced The Mindy Project before co-creating Never Have I Ever with Kaling, told The Daily Beast that 15,000 hopefuls responded to their casting call for the series lead. “Most of them were these amazing young women who auditioned in earnest,” Fisher said. “There were also some weirdos who auditioned. I think there was a Jamaican man?”

Given the volume of the response, it might seem surprising that a relative novice landed the role—that is, until you see what she can do.

“She’s a real star; she sells the whole thing,” Fisher said of Ramakrishnan. “You can teach someone to act, but you really can’t teach someone to be funny. And we just needed someone who really got a freshness to the role, because this kid has such an attitude and has to be lovable while being selfish.”

And make no mistake: For all her charm, Devi really can be be the worst. As she struggles to process her grief over her father, Mohan’s death, she frequently lashes out at her mother and dismisses her friends. She spends most of her therapy sessions asking her therapist (played to bemused perfection by Niecy Nash) to tell her she’s fuckable—or begging her to secretly buy her a thong.

At first, Kaling and Fisher imagined Devi’s therapist as a pushover—but eventually, they decided to make her one of the few people Devi actually respects. When they recalled Nash’s arc from The Mindy Project, they knew she’d be perfect for the role—and Nash, whose own experience with therapy has proven invaluable, jumped at the opportunity to work with Kaling again.

“I’ve been in therapy probably a little over two years now, right at two years, and it’s such a valuable asset,” Nash said as she explained the appeal of the role. “That’s number one. But number two, I just feel like this is a story I haven’t seen before—through a lens I haven’t seen before, at least, and I was happy to be a part of it.”

As she read the scripts, Nash knew she had to come aboard. “You know you’ve tapped into something when you can’t wait to find, ‘Oh what’s going to happen next? Is she going to get the guy? What’s gonna happen when she goes back to school? What’s her mother gonna say about that? Oh, this is gonna be a thing!’” she said. “That’s how I knew it was going to be very entertaining. I think people are gonna love this little girl.”

Plus, as a mother of three, Nash immediately recognized mercurial antics.

“If you were a kid, you know what it is,” Nash said. “If you’ve raised three of them—and girls are very different than boys. Every scene is on 10. It’s a full-on fire. All of it. So I knew the world very well… You could cry for a whole week just over cutting your bangs. Everything is a thing.”

And according to Nash, you’d never know that this was Ramakrishnan’s first professional gig. She was even able to keep up as Nash improvised some of her lines. (“Mindy knows I’m from the improv world, so if there were some times where some words may have tasted better in my mouth than others, they were absolutely amenable to that,” Nash explained.)

“I thought that our doctor-patient relationship flowed really well,” Nash said. “Just in terms of us being able to listen to each other—even if it slid off-script a little bit we could stay connected.”

Image Source:*Courtesy of Netflix

Source:thedailybeast.com