Avantika Vandanapu was seven when she first watched Mean Girls with her dad, eight years after the summer of 2004, when the Lindsay Lohan-starrer became a sensation, and Amanda Seyfried’s Karen gained icon status with ‘I’m a mouse, duh!’. As a movie where three “Mean Girls” dominate a high school till they are dethroned by another one, the original was a power game for white girls. The only brown character was Kevin Gnapoor, math nerd with an unreal Indian surname. So naturally, when it was announced that a brown ‘Mean Girl’ had arrived, everyone’s eyes were on Vandanapu.
“It felt unreal,” she recalls, over a 9am call, about the movie’s 2024 musical reboot with a brand new cast, including Vandanapu who reprises Seyfried’s role. After a flurry of promotional activities around Mean Girls, which released on January 12, March found the 19-year-old actor at her family home in Hyderabad. It was not downtime – she was working on the release of the series Big Girls Don’t Cry, now streaming on Prime Video, in which she plays Ludo, a sports-loving high-schooler in the cool clique, hiding her sexuality from friends. Coming-of-age stories set in a school or college and its contesting groups seem to feature prominently in her work considering Moxie (2021), Senior Year (2022) and the HBO Max series The Sex Life of College Girls (2021).
Source: Avantika Vandanapu: In Her Post ‘Mean Girls’ Era | The Voice Of Fashion