Lena Khan on Directing 'Best of the Best' for Netflix — SkimNews
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- Lena Khan directed 'Best of the Best' for Netflix, following two childhood best friends joining UCLA's competitive Bollywood dance team on the road to the U.S. Championship, written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam based on their own circuit experience.
- Maitreyi Ramakrishnan completed months of intensive dance training after Khan told her she needed 'Channing Tatum energy' and then a 'complete athletic transformation' like Christian Bale, despite never having danced competitively before landing the role.
- Choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman, with co-choreographer Joya Kazi, drew on Kuthu, Bharatanatyam, and Pakistani-influenced styles, often shooting each number in just one day versus the typical five days for a Bollywood sequence.
- Khan resisted pressure to over-explain South Asian references for a global Netflix audience, citing her earlier work on 'Never Have I Ever' as proof that viewers no longer need cultural context spelled out.
- Khan noted the industry still rarely casts South Asian men as romantic leads, and the film flips a familiar dynamic by making the 'nerdy minority character' a white guy — what she called a 'token white guy.'
- The film also stars Lilly Singh, Nihar Duvvuri, Nico Greetham, Amryn Khurana, Tanishq Joshi, Saara Chaudry, and Sasha Bhasin, and is streaming now on Netflix.
Why it matters: Khan's casting of a 'token white guy' as the nerdy minority and her refusal to over-explain cultural references mark a shift in how South Asian-led projects reach global Netflix audiences since her 2016 indie 'The Tiger Hunter,' though she flags that South Asian men still rarely get to play romantic leads.
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