Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is saying goodbye to Paxton Hall-Yoshida and Ben Gross and hello to Mr. Darcy in “The Netherfield Girls.” The “Never Have I Ever” star has signed on to topline the contemporary take on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” with Becca Gleason set to direct. Variety broke the news.
Written by Gleason, the Netflix pic will see Ramakrishnan portraying Lizzie Bennet, a young woman who “eventually discovers the man she thinks is Mr. Wrong is in fact Mr. Right.”
A release date hasn’t been announced.
Ramakrishnan stars as Devi Vishwakumar in “Never Have I Ever,” Mindy Kaling’s Netflix comedy about a first-generation Indian-American teenager. A hit among critics and audiences, the series will return for a second season in July.
“It’s a lot when, you know, you’re expected to represent the entirety of the South Asian community, which is impossible,” Ramakrishnan told NPR. “You can’t because the South Asian community is so vast and wide that you can’t possibly represent the entire community within one story, within one girl, because there’s so many stories to be told. And in that way, I still think it is awesome that I get to bring the story of Devi to life and have one story be told to hopefully pave way for more stories to be told.”
Gleason’s feature debut, Joey King-starrer “Summer ’03,” told the story of a teenager grieving her grandmother’s death and exploring her sexuality. The coming-of-age story premiered at SXSW in 2018.
Other Austen adaptations in the works include Mahalia Belo’s “Persuasion,” starring “Succession’s” Sarah Snook, and “Modern Austen,” a one-hour anthology series in development at The CW that will update Austen’s novels.