n a perfect New York Thursday afternoon — the kind where both a cardigan and a crop top can be the right answer — I’m the last stop on Avantika’s full-day press junket. She and the cast of Hulu’s new young adult comedy, Not Suitable For
avantika is just getting started
Mindy Kaling's newest muse worries she's peaked. She's only in her opening act.
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Work, have been stuck in Soho’s Dominick Hotel since 9 a.m. I’m the only thing standing between her and a well-deserved TikTok scroll or crisp glass of pinot grigio.
The 21-year-old actress stars as Abby, an assistant to a high-maintenance celebrity stylist, portrayed by a formidable Constance Wu. Abby is naive yet determined, and her warm, inviting presence makes you feel like having a roommate again maybe wouldn’t be so bad. Like her character, Avantika brings a seemingly effortless effervescence to our chat, even though there’s probably a thousand places she’d rather be.
“I see Abby as a daughter to Samantha Jones,” she tells me, and cites Lena Dunham’s entire Girls universe as a major influence. While Not Suitable For Work has a sanitized, PG-13 sheen that distances it from those grittier inspirations, if you’ve ever been an entry-level girlboss-in-training, the trials of Abby and her compatriots are immediately recognizable and deeply relatable. Like becoming best friends with the printer attendant at Staples, because obtaining 27 immaculate meeting packets is now a life-or-death responsibility. Or replying “got it!” to an insane Slack from your manager when you’re one breakdown away from rage-quitting. And dressing for the office like you stepped out of an Express catalog, when in reality, sneakers and slacks would look far less desperate.
Despite her newbie status in the cutthroat world of celebrity fashion, “Abby doesn’t let self-doubt get the best of her,” Avantika notes. In episode five, Abby takes a major leap of faith, choosing to leave her mercurial boss and start out on her own, accepting a styling gig with Cate Blanchett’s (smoking hot) fictional nephew. “There have been so many times I’ve sat in my room and thought, ‘If it’s not perfect, I don’t even want to try.’ But [Abby] does. And I find that very admirable.”
That fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality is a familiar hallmark of your first job out of college, and apparently, it extends to glamorous actresses, too. “I have imposter syndrome in every room I walk into, actively as we speak right now,” Avantika admits. “There are so many moments when you think, 'Do I really belong here? Was this just a fluke?' And you’re constantly worried about having peaked. . .despite being young, that fear has never escaped me.”
This anxiety and self-critique made Avantika’s breakout role in the 2024 movie adaptation of the Mean Girls musical come as a total surprise. While she had been steadily booking gigs across India and the States since she was 10 years old, she was convinced that her audition for the lovable bimbo Karen was “one of the worst I had ever done.” Certain she had zero chance of advancing, she actually reached out to another young actress she had admired from afar, sent her the sides, and encouraged her to submit. (Talk about the opposite of a mean girl.) But Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels had other ideas, and Avantika’s life as she knew it changed overnight.
That vote of confidence from two comedy legends may have been the boost Avantika needed to fight her way into the cast of Not Suitable For Work. “I first read about the project in the trades, when it was still being called Murray Hill, and I thought, ‘This is perfect.’” She was living just a few blocks from the titular frat bro neighborhood and was excited at the thought of filming something in New York and laying down roots.
“I did not get an audition,” she reveals. “Casting was like, ‘There’s not really a part for you, babe, and we appreciate the enthusiasm, but sorry.’” Much like Abby hunting down a creative director at his favorite local restaurant to pitch her client, Avantika went the extra mile and pleaded with them to advocate for her with their higher-ups. They acquiesced, but still tempered her expectations: “You’re not exactly what they’re looking for,” they warned.
When the big audition day came, Avantika was in India, forced to contend with an unfavorable time difference. “It was like 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. my time, and my loud-ass fan was beating in the background. I didn’t think I did that great.” But once again, her self-doubt was off-base, and she was flown to LA for a chemistry read with Ella Hunt, the actress who portrays AJ. “It was so nerve-wracking, but our spark was sort of instantaneous,” she recalls.
A welcome presence in that intimidating room was creator Mindy Kaling, who tells me that Avantika “blew past whatever preconceived idea we had for the role.” She emphasized how rare it is that an actor makes you rethink the part itself, but Avantika brought a “combination of movie-star presence and comedy instincts that’s incredibly hard to find.”
Not Suitable For Work is the third project in a trio of Kaling brainchildren, each inspired by a chapter of her youth. Netflix’s Never Have I Ever was an homage to her experience as a South Asian teen in America, HBO Max’s Sex Lives of College Girls was inspired by her time at Dartmouth, and Hulu’s Not Suitable For Work explores the naked ambition that defined her first post-collegiate years in New York.
Avantika guest-starred on Sex Lives in its second season, portraying Bela’s annoyingly cool younger cousin. But she didn’t meet Kaling until later, since, as she puts it, “[Kaling’s] a mogul juggling one million and one other things.” Their fortuitous meeting did come, though, after the then-17-year-old sent her idol a cold Instagram DM.
“There are so many moments when I think, 'Do I really belong here? Was this just a fluke?'
And you're constantly worried about having peaked. . .despite being young, that fear has never escaped me."
BY EMMA SHARPE | PUBLISHED ON JUNE 18, 2026
“Never meet your heroes unless they're Mindy Kaling."
Kaling offered to take Avantika to lunch, and the rest sounds like something straight out of a teenage girl’s fan fiction. “We met at a French restaurant in a strip mall, and Mindy said, ‘You need to try escargot — I’m going to change your life.’” (When I ask Kaling for her recollection of that day, she tells me she found Avantika to be “absurdly charismatic” and “unfazed by the fact that I was aggressively trying to make her eat snails.”)
The surreal nature of the experience was not lost on the young actress: “Indian female idols who we can look up to are few and far between in the American film industry. We all grew up watching Mindy. It’s every brown girl’s dream.” All the while, Avantika’s dad sat patiently, 200 feet away in the parking lot, waiting to drive her home as if she were just a regular high schooler grabbing Chipotle with her friends. “Never meet your heroes, unless they’re Mindy Kaling,” she quips.
Her admiration for the Mindy Cinematic Universe extends to her current castmates, Ella Hunt, Jack Martin, Will Angus, and Nicholas Duvernay. While some casts choose to operate as cordial coworkers, this crew has made team bonding a major priority — and not in an HR-forcing-everyone-to-play-pickleball-to-“boost morale” kind of way. “Aside from being traumatized by Jack Martin and his genius escape room idea, we all just love hanging out with each other. We went to Six Flags. We went to karaoke. The show just has this, ‘Oh my God, we get paid to do this?’ kind of vibe.”
kyle sheehan
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"Growing up, on any day you would catch me in yoga pants, Uggs, and one of my dad’s tech company t-shirts.
I really struggled with style when I was younger. But I think you kind of shed that over-self-consciousness as you grow older."
When she’s not filming, you might find Avantika dancing at a Brooklyn salsa club or playing the human crane game at Dave & Busters (“I know it’s very childish of me, but I love it there.”) She frequents New York’s Comedy Cellar, with some of her current favorite standups including Bo Burnham (“I always thought he was very straight man comedy, but he’s obviously a genius”), Zakir Khan, Nikki Glaser, and The Basement Yard comedy podcast, which she loves listening to before bed. It all sounds like very normal, relatable, twenty-something antics, until she shows up on a red carpet in full glam and vintage Missoni.
“Growing up, on any day you would catch me in yoga pants, Uggs, and one of my dad’s tech company t-shirts. I really struggled with style when I was younger. But I think you kind of shed that over-self-consciousness as you grow older.”
Commercial success has placed Avantika in rooms (and in gowns) that only a lucky few have the privilege of accessing, and she’s eager to take full advantage of the resources at her disposal: “I love color, I love print, I love textile. I think it’s so important to see brown women at the forefront of fashion. It shapes the zeitgeist, it shapes the way we perceive women of color.”
Avantika may have only just reached legal drinking age, but she carries herself with the poise of a seasoned industry veteran, or maybe a U.N. diplomat. I’m not surprised when she tells me she aspires to one day follow in Kaling’s footsteps, writing and producing herself — “It’s one of the coolest ways to create opportunities for the communities you care about.”
Multi-hyphen, here she comes.