Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, the actress still outrunning the role that found her

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan

Photo: TAG TV / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 28, 2001 Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Turning Red, Freakier Friday, The Twits
Awards	Canadian Screen Award

Most actors spend years proving they can carry a show. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan was handed one before she had a single professional credit, and she has spent every season since proving something harder: that the girl Mindy Kaling picked out of a mountain of self-taped auditions was never the whole of her. Devi Vishwakumar, the furious, grieving, very funny teenager at the centre of Never Have I Ever, put her face in tens of millions of homes at once. The character has followed her into every room since, the way a first hit follows a songwriter. What has shifted lately is the terms of the argument. In her newest lead role she asked the writers to change one line about where her character comes from, and that small edit has become the most public thing she has done in years.

She grew up in Mississauga, the sprawling city on Toronto’s western edge, where she was raised by Tamil parents who had left Sri Lanka as refugees from its civil war. She went through Meadowvale Secondary School and started to take acting seriously only in her final year there. York University offered her a place in its theatre programme; she deferred it, and later switched to human rights and equity studies instead.

The route in has become the origin story Netflix likes to tell. Kaling’s open casting call drew about 15,000 submissions. Ramakrishnan recorded hers at a local library with her mother’s camera, sent four more videos when the producers asked, then flew to Los Angeles for a screen test. She was 17, her birthday falling on 28 December 2001, and she had never acted professionally.

Never Have I Ever, created by Kaling and Lang Fisher, arrived on Netflix in April 2020, in the first weeks of pandemic lockdowns, and the platform reported that 40 million households had watched it by July. Devi was a Tamil American high-school student working through her father’s sudden death with bad decisions, loud crushes and a temper she could not hide, and Ramakrishnan played her with a speed and a lack of vanity that Variety called a breakout performance. The series ran for four seasons and 40 episodes and closed in June 2023 with a finale written by Kaling and Fisher. Along the way came a place on the Time100 Next list in 2021, an Independent Spirit Award nomination, and in 2022 the Radius Award at the Canadian Screen Awards, which recognises Canadians making their mark abroad.

Alongside the show’s later seasons, much of her other work happened in a recording booth. She voiced Priya, the dry, unflappable member of Mei’s friend group in Pixar’s Turning Red, and spent more than a hundred episodes as the pegasus Zipp Storm across My Little Pony: Make Your Mark and My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale. Voice acting suited an actor whose face was fused to one character. It let her play without being seen as Devi.

The live-action break came in 2025, spread across very different films. In Amy Wang’s Slanted, a satirical body-horror story about a Chinese American teenager who undergoes an experimental procedure to become white, she played Brindha alongside Shirley Chen and Mckenna Grace; the film won the narrative grand jury prize at SXSW. In Freakier Friday she was Ella, the heartbroken pop star managed by Lindsay Lohan‘s character, a small part in a sequel that took more than $150 million worldwide. For Netflix’s Roald Dahl adaptation The Twits she voiced Beesha Balti, a 12-year-old orphan, and earned an Annie Award nomination for voice acting in a feature.

Best of the Best, released on Netflix on 18 September 2026, is the clearest test yet of whether she can carry a film. Lena Khan directed from a script by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, and Ramakrishnan plays Maya Krishnaraj, who joins UCLA’s Bollywood-fusion dance team with her childhood friend Anjali, played by Priyanka Kedia, to beat a rival squad at a national competition. Both leads trained up to six times a week for four months, and A. R. Rahman wrote a track for the film as an homage to her Tamil heritage. Critics were warm about the two leads and cooler about the story, which several found as formula-bound as the Bollywood clichés it sets out to tease.

The film’s sharpest afterlife came from a single line. An early draft had Maya introduce herself as Tamil Sri Lankan; Ramakrishnan asked for it to become “I’m Tamil. My family’s from Sri Lanka,” because that is how she describes herself, and has since at least 2019, when she told NOW Magazine that her country is Canada and her culture is Tamil. Promoting the film on Minhaj’s podcast, she said she loved who she was as a “Tamil Eelam woman.” In Sri Lanka the word Eelam is bound up with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and Sinhala nationalist Facebook pages answered with a campaign of one-star IMDb ratings; the Jaffna Monitor reported that at least one page handed followers ready-made prompts for generating negative reviews with AI chatbots. Tamil student groups in Canada and Britain rallied behind her. The episode says less about a dance comedy than about the position she has held since she was 17: celebrated as representation in the abstract, and attacked the moment that representation named a specific history.

Her year has pulled her in other directions too. She turned up in the final season of The Boys as Countess Crow, a goth member of the teen superhero act Teenage Kix whose influencer-era gloom ends in an unexpected reprieve, and she joined the second season of Prime Video‘s Legally Blonde prequel Elle in a recurring role as Sam, the school newspaper’s joyless editor-in-chief and Elle’s natural foil. Away from sets she finished her York degree in 2025, and she has been a global ambassador for Plan International Canada, which campaigns for the rights of girls and young women, since 2020.

Next comes The Angry Birds Movie 3, which Paramount has dated for 23 December 2026, with Ramakrishnan in a voice role the studio has yet to reveal. The Netherfield Girls, the modern-day Pride and Prejudice that Netflix announced with her as Lizzie Bennet back in 2021, still has no release date. It would be a fitting role to finally play: a heroine remembered above all for refusing to let other people decide who she is.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Best of the Best, Freakier Friday, Hasan Minhaj, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Mindy Kaling

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