How the 'Best of the Best' Stars Prepared for Those Dance Scenes | Just Jared

Best of the Best is now streaming on Netflix and many fans are curious about the movie’s impressive dance scenes.

Stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia spent months preparing for the film and underwent extensive training. Maitreyi wanted to learn how to do a dance move that was originally going to be assigned to a double.

She plays Maya, while Priyanka plays her childhood best friend, Anjali. The pair join UCLA’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team in director Lena Khan‘s comedy, putting their friendship into a demanding new setting.

The preparation went beyond learning a routine

The Never Have I Ever star told People that her four-month prep for the role involved six dance classes a day, six days a week.

“I’m not someone who grew up playing a sport and I didn’t like sweating. So you can paint the picture of a Brown girl sweaty on the floor. Flat as a pancake, dying and dry heaving. That was me,” she said.

Choreographer Joya Kazi said the two leads had progressed enough to keep pace with the professional dancers. She praised both stars as impressing her the most during training, saying “they’re the ones who worked the longest.”

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The choreography had to tell a story

Director Lena Khan worked with Kazi, Makenzie Dustman, and Phillip Chbeeb on the movie’s choreography. In Cosmopolitan‘s first-look feature, Khan explained that the numbers needed their own identities while still serving the story and her approach included ambitious staging built around the scene’s emotional purpose.

“I wanted us to go big—whether it was magic realism or elaborate set design—at one point we literally built a mountain on stage—to pull out whatever theme or feeling the story needed in that moment,” she said.

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What the stars have said about performing the moves

Priyanka talked to Netflix Tudum about she was proud of a difficult flip she learned during a performance alongside co-star Ankur Rathee.

“I remember pulling that off for the first time and being like, ‘Whoa, I can do that. That’s crazy,’” she recalled.

Maitreyi also found herself pushed to her limits during an impressive bit of choreography in the finale with a slide akin to something you might see in a Mission Impossible movie.

That was the moment the director was intending to use doubles, but Maitreyi wanted to do it herself.

“I said, ‘Hey, if it doesn’t inconvenience anyone or time on set, I would love to just do this move myself because months ago I was never physically able to do this move. But now that I’ve trained my body to be able to do something like this, I’d like to do it,” she shared

A portion of her stunt made it into the final cut.

Best of the Best is now streaming on Netflix. Watch the official Netflix trailer for a preview of the competition.

Posted To:Best Of The Best Maitreyi Ramakrishnan Movies Netflix Priyanka Kedia