It was a lot, she admits, but she considered it a necessity to find the right actor. The casting search for Devi was intense: In April 2019, Kaling put out an open call for auditions and got more than 15,000 submissions. Mindy Kaling watches a scene with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (right), Richa Moorjani (center), and Poorna Jagannathan (left). Even when the show tips into the dramatic and emotional - especially as Devi works with a therapist (Niecy Nash) to grieve her beloved father, who died suddenly the previous school year - it doesn’t derail her. When she announces to her friends that they’re all getting boyfriends, they don’t question the plausibility of her plan they just do it. Unlike so many other teen characters, especially South Asian ones portrayed onscreen, Devi isn’t meek. “Each episode is supposed to be tailored to something these girls want and the dreams of having a normal teenage experience.” “Mindy and I were both sort of nerds in high school, but we had these giant personalities, so we created this character to have confidence and a big personality,” Fisher said. It was like doing a little bit of therapy every day.” “From there, I hired a really young, diverse staff and then we all delved into our childhoods.
She jumped at the opportunity,” Kaling said. “In writing about teens, I wanted someone who was very interested in that and had a lot of experience watching those shows. With a straight-to-series order in hand, Kaling recruited her friend Lang Fisher, a veteran of The Mindy Project, who wrote the episode “ Mindy Lahiri Is a White Man,” as well as 30 Rock and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, who is a fan of teen shows like Riverdale, Beverly Hills, 90210, and Gossip Girl. Never Have I Ever began as a pitch to Kaling from a Netflix executive, Brooke Kessler, who read both of Kaling’s books and loved the parts about her high-school years. “I couldn’t even say a moment in my life where I feel truly embarrassed.” “I know I’m a really confident person, and it takes a lot to make me nervous,” she says. Ramakrishnan’s path to a leading role on a Netflix show is about as unlikely as it gets - her last acting gig was playing Velma Kelly in her high school’s production of Chicago back in Ontario - but she doesn’t pretend to be surprised that she nailed it. Talking to newcomer Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, the 18-year-old star of Never Have I Ever, it’s easy to understand how Devi came to life onscreen as a nerd with a rock-solid sense of self-worth. Upending rom-com logic, he nonchalantly says he’s down Devi says she’ll circle back about it and shakes his hand. After declaring in the first episode that she and her best friends will get boyfriends for their sophomore year, Devi confidently waltzes up to the most popular boy in school - the unreasonably handsome Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet) - and asks him to have sex.
#Never have i ever maitreyi ramakrishnan age tv#
She fulfills all the expected TV tropes of a nerd.Īlmost all of them. She hasn’t dated anybody, much less had her first kiss. Her two best friends are obsessed with robotics and drama club.
In Never Have I Ever, the new Netflix show co-created by Mindy Kaling, Devi Vishwakumar is a straight-A student who plays the harp, is an ace at Model U.N., and dreams of going to Princeton University. Photo: LARA SOLANKI/NETFLIX/LARA SOLANKI/NETFLIX
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