Priyanka Kedia spent four months training like a dancer for Best of the Best. It taught her to trust her body

Mention Best of the Best and the 24-year-old actor immediately lights up. One minute, she’s laughing about nine-hour dance rehearsals; the next, she’s describing bruised ribs and being flipped head-over-heels into a backbend with the breeziness of someone recounting a particularly energetic Pilates class. “I pushed my body so much and did so much more than I thought I was capable of doing,” she tells Vogue, the excitement still very much intact.

In the Netflix coming-of-age comedy, dance is more than choreography. Through Kedia’s character Anjali, it becomes tangled up with friendship, identity and the experience of growing up as a child of immigrants. It was territory Kedia understood instinctively. “Dance was a way for us children of immigrants to connect to our culture,” she says.

That relationship with movement had also been sharpened by her acting training. Kedia studied theatre at NYU, earning a BFA, and trained both at the Stella Adler School of Acting and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where movement formed a significant part of the curriculum. She remembers classes where words were taken away entirely, forcing students to consider how they moved through a space and responded to the bodies around them. “Everyone should take an acting class. It’s honestly fascinating,” she tells me with enough conviction that, for a moment, I consider it.

Preparing to embody that relationship physically as a competitive dancer, however, was another matter. For four months before filming, Kedia trained like a competitive dancer, rehearsing for up to nine hours a day, five days a week. But the experience didn’t overturn an aesthetic-first relationship with fitness. She never really had one. “I think of fitness more as movement,” she says. “I adopted it as a practice into my life more as a way of taking care of my mental health.” What the film added was trust in her body.

There is one sequence she still talks about with a mix of disbelief and pride. At the beginning of a competition dance, her co-star Ankur flips her over and she lands in a backbend. “That was such a challenging sequence for me to nail,” she says. The trick wasn’t simply strength. There was, apparently, no room for half-hearted optimism either. “If there’s any ounce of doubt, you’re going to fall,” she says. “The only way to do it is to trust fully that that person is going to be there to catch you and that your body’s natural instincts are going to kick in.”

That trust was tested off-camera, too. Kedia filmed much of the movie with a bruised rib, which she admits she never really gave enough time to recover from. Learning when not to push proved almost as difficult as learning the choreography. “Giving yourself the grace to sit out or to take a rest day is actually really hard,” she says. It’s a lesson she’s “still learning”.

Her relationship with movement now looks considerably less intense. She goes to reformer Pilates, takes dance classes when she can and, perhaps most enthusiastically, walks. Here, Kedia becomes particularly animated about our tendency to overcomplicate wellness. “We have such a focus on wellness being something that you have to put on a matching set, go to a studio and get a membership for,” she says. “Going for a walk around your city and neighbourhood is movement also.”

One of her favourite ways to spend downtime now is to pick a neighbourhood in New York, put on her walking shoes and head out for 40 minutes. “You’re outside and you’re connected and you’re seeing the people around you while also moving your body,” she says.