When you first catch a glimpse of Avantika in the official Mean Girls trailer, it’s impossible to look away. Her long black curls, tall stature, and brown skin stand out amongst a sea of blonde, but it’s not just her beauty that commands attention: near the end of the teaser, she delivers her first lines as Karen, one of the “Plastics” in Regina George’s gang. Trading Regina’s weight gain from the original 2004 film for an unsightly pimple, Karen reassures the ringleader that the growth on her face is “sexy… like a face breast,” delivered with a breathiness bordering on a lisp. It’s part of Avantika’s decision to make Karen feel “a little bit distant” emotionally — a fresh yet still funny take on the beloved character originated by Amanda Seyfried.
The 18-year-old may not be a household name yet, but what strikes me as we chat via Zoom between an appropriately rainy Los Angeles (“there’s a 30% chance it’s already raining,” anyone?) and her dorm room at Columbia University in New York is her mature outlook on her career and future. It’s similar to how I felt the first time Avantika and I talked in 2021, when her Disney Channel Original Movie Spin announced her to the world as the first lead of South Asian descent for the channel.
Then 16 years old, she spoke with poise from her parents’ SoCal home about the early opportunities in Indian cinema that eventually led her to that breakout leading role, while already looking ahead to producing goals. Now on the cusp of her 19th birthday, she’s just as well-spoken and clear-headed about her career, trading her childhood home for her dream school across the country, where a poster of one of her role models, Beyoncé, is prominently displayed on the wall behind her.
Related: Meet “Spin” Star Avantika, Disney Channel’s First Indian American Movie Star
“I’ve always wanted to go to college and have an education,” she says, explaining that she used the 2023 WGA and SAG strikes as the optimal moment to make the move. “I will always be in entertainment…[but] this felt like a good opportunity to focus on studying and learning.” Unlike many actors her age who opt for film majors, Avantika plans to study cultural anthropology, which she views as complimentary to her industry aspirations. “There’s something really fascinating about learning how different cultures influence human minds. I think it’s already informed my perspective on storytelling quite a bit.”
When it comes to Mean Girls, Avantika has been a fan of the original film ever since she was introduced to it by an unlikely source: her “very pro-chick-flicks” dad. “I grew up watching it more times than I can count,” she says, echoing a sentiment many likely resonate with. “It was one of the first films that captured how nuanced female bullying in schools can be — it was never outright, it was so sharp that you didn't even know when it cut and before you knew it, you were bleeding out,” she says. All of the women in the film are “mean girls,” she continues, but still manage to be an idealized version of adolescence. “It was both a cautionary tale and this paradigm of the woman I wanted to be in high school.”
Canonically, Karen is portrayed as an airhead who confuses ESP and ESPN, thinks she can predict the weather by grabbing her breasts, and doesn’t see an issue with hooking up with her first cousin. Stepping into Karen’s high heels and mouse ears wasn’t something that scared Avantika. In fact, the “stupid, funny, silly, and kind” character was always Avantika’s favorite in the film because of those characteristics. “It's very difficult for me to glamorize cruelty in film, so Karen was easily my favorite. I thought there was something really pure and beautiful about watching somebody retain how kind of a person they are despite their circumstances,” she observes.
If we’re purely conversing in stereotypes, “stupid” isn’t usually part of the vernacular that describes South Asian students in America. That’s a notion that Avantika rejects, describing intelligence as a “neutral trait” before acknowledging that it’s contrary to how this diaspora has been perceived for so long in this country. “There’s a certain level of friction that comes from breaking boundaries and stereotypes. [This role] should help release us from the narrative that we can only play certain characters,” she says. But when the first Mean Girls trailer dropped, the reaction from the internet didn’t exactly channel Karen’s kindness or shatter stereotypical ideas about South Asians — many couldn’t see past the blonde hair and white skin of the original iteration from two decades ago.
“Imagine getting bullied by an Indian girl,” one commenter posted. “Why is one brown,” another one simply asked. The racially-charged comments weren’t missed by the self-described curious Avantika, who went down the rabbit hole to see what people were saying online. “There’s some gray area between being honest to yourself and the art, and also catering to the audiences who are watching and consuming this content,” she reasons. “I’ve never been shy about reading comments.”
After so many years in the business, Avantika has developed a thick skin when it comes to the court of public opinion. The teenager says the backlash didn’t take a toll on her largely because people were so baseless in their accusations. “If anybody says anything about my acting, I’m like ‘please tell me more.’ If you don’t feel like you’re connecting to the character on screen, I should know,” she says of her craft. “But if you’re talking about how you can smell the character from the screen, you’re simply an ignorant person and a bigot, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Here’s where that thick skin comes in again: the online prejudice was something she actually found amusing. “I thought it was funny how the movie was called Mean Girls and everybody was being a mean girl on Twitter,” she explains, pointing out the irony. Instead of internalizing the hundreds of disparaging tweets about her, she simply screenshotted her favorite ones and posted them on Instagram with the apt caption “mean girls.” When I ask her why she made the post, she audibly laughs. “Some of the hate comments were funny, so I was like ‘why not?’” Though the post wasn’t meant to garner sympathy, floods of comments from prominent South Asian entertainers like Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Mindy Kaling, and Ritesh Rajan rolled in, voicing their support for Avantika.
It’s important to note that casting Avantika was never just a cheap grab at diversity. She knew she had been shortlisted for the role based on her working relationship with Paramount Pictures (who produced her 2022 Netflix film Senior Year), but she still had to audition for the role of “Karen Smith,” which included singing her character’s big number “Sexy” — something she was dreading as “exclusively, until now, a shower singer.”
She didn’t hear back about her audition for three months. Then one day, while on location in Serbia for a movie, her agent called her to tell her the good news. “It felt like a scam,” she jokes, referencing the lack of callbacks or meetings with anyone behind the scenes of the film. It wasn’t until she was on set that it hit her: she was going to be part of Mean Girls.
The set was a reunion, not just for Tina Fey and Tim Meadows who starred in the original 2004 film but also for the new actors stepping into the iconic central roles. Avantika guest-starred on Renee Rapp’s (reprising her Broadway role as Regina George) Max show The Sex Lives of College Girls and shared the screen with Angourie Rice (Cady Heron) in Senior Year. The familiar dynamics on set put everyone at ease and cleared the way for tweaking the script and characters — it was Fey who floated the idea of changing Karen’s name to match Avantika’s background, fearing that the actor wouldn’t be comfortable being called “Karen Smith.”
To her credit, Avantika wasn’t worried about anything except authenticity and suggested that they keep “Karen” and only tamper with the last name. Fey threw out some options (common North Indian surnames like Sheth and Singh) and Avantika talked it over with her mom before landing on “Shetty,” a last name that generally hails from South India. “This is a rare occasion in which South Indians, specifically someone of Telugu heritage, could get representation,” Avantika remembers of the opportunity. “I told Tina [to name her Shetty] and the next day it was in the script.”
Though we won’t get to hear Avantika ask her friends if they want to go “somewhere fun…like Taco Bell” or give Karen’s infamous weather report as Fey wanted to differentiate the two movies, the young actor still flexed her comedic chops to suggest punch-ups during filming. “It was a very open, free space for us to play around and experiment,” she says before revealing that some of her pitches even made it into the final edit. Beyond dialogue tweaks, Avantika also threw out ideas for physical comedy: in the re-creation of the trust fall sequence, she pitched the idea of Karen falling face-first instead of backwards, which Fey loved and immediately greenlit.
Between Senior Year and Mean Girls, it would seem like Avantika is poised to be the next young comedienne, but she’s smartly resisting pigeon-holing herself into any one genre and hopes that others won’t “box her in because of this role.” In 2024, aside from Mean Girls, she’ll be starring in a to-be-announced Hindi/English drama series for Prime Video and the thriller/horror film Horrorscope, while beginning development on the adaptation of the fantasy novel A Crown of Wishes for Disney+, which she’s executive producing and starring in. “I would love to have a thriving production company in the next five years,” she says, explaining that she wants to work on indie films that highlight the diversity within the larger South Asian diaspora. Having started her career in Indian cinema, Avantika also has her sights set on a career in Bollywood.
But for now, she plans to stay in school (“I’ve signed up for next semester”) and learn more about the craft of writing and producing. Though she has a bit of anxiety about the response to Mean Girls and hopes people can “embrace its campiness and goofiness, and remember that it’s supposed to be whimsical and silly,” she’s leaning on what she’s learned at college to help her cope. “When you’re in Hollywood, it feels like there’s a sword on your neck and the clock is constantly ticking to prove yourself,” she explains. “I’ve learned that things are just not that serious.”
Credits
Photographer: Bea Oyster
Photo/Lighting Assistant: Nadine Zhan
Digitech: Todd Midler
Photo Retouching: Matthew So
Props/Set Design: Julia Rose
Prop Assistant: Elizabeth Neibergall
Stylist: Kat Thomas
Stylist Assistant: Tascha Berkowitz
Makeup Artist: Kirin Bhatty at A-Frame Agency
Hair Stylist: Tommy Buckett at Tracey Mattingly Agency
Design Director/Producer: Emily Zirimis
Designer/Producer: Liz Coulbourn
Senior Culture Editor: P. Claire Dodson
