Stepping into the spotlight with a breakout television role is a dream come true for any rising star, but for Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, overnight superstardom came with a surprisingly exhausting side effect: a fan base that genuinely cannot tell where the actor ends and the character begins. Ever since she captured global hearts as the chaotic, wonderfully flawed teen Devi Vishwakumar in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, Ramakrishnan has had to navigate a digital landscape plagued by blurred boundaries. 

Now, the outspoken actor is drawing a hard line, calling out a staggering drop in public media literacy.

In a sit-down with Variety’s Tiana DeNicola, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan has taken a jab at the state of media literacy right now. While shedding light on a wide array of aspects of her life and professional career during the conversation, she came across something that led her to conclude:

“I fear media literacy is at an all-time low.”  

Actually, during a segment in the Variety interview, Ramakrishnan was supposed to read all of the internet searches for her name from the day out of a fishbowl. The very first search that she pulled was a query about her university being Princeton, as does Devi in the finale of the Mindy Kaling show.   

She was actually flattered at first that people think she went to Princeton. But when the host jokingly pointed out the fact that they think she is actually Devi (her Never Have I Ever character) in real life, her expression changed. She expressed her concern over the way people fail to dissociate the reel from real life. 

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Unfortunately, the young actress has been facing this for a long time, struggling to convince the audience that her on-screen breakout persona is not the reality of her life.

For performers, few things are quite as exhausting as the eternal struggle to convince spectators that an imaginary persona is not the actuality of their life. This is a reality Maitreyi Ramakrishnan knows all too well; since catapulting into international stardom as the wildly impulsive high schooler Devi Vishwakumar in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, the young actor has weathered a relentless storm of cyber harassment and overly invested fan projection.   

Ramakrishnan has often been candid about her complex, love-hate dynamic with the digital landscape, pointing out that social networks frequently turn toxic when audiences conflate her private identity with her character's messy onscreen choices. Because the smash-hit series served as her professional acting debut, much of her fanbase essentially watched her grow up exclusively through the lens of Devi. Lacking a broader catalog of prior roles or an established public track record before landing the part, casual viewers with a weak grasp of media literacy eagerly filled in the blanks - mistakenly assuming she was simply playing an unscripted version of herself.

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What do you think of Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s assessment of the current state of media literacy? Do let us know.