If there is anyone climbing the ranks of her generation’s rising stars, it's Avantika. Some may recognise the 21-year old American actress for reintroducing iconic fictional character Karen Smith, in the 2024 Mean Girls musical remake (as Karen Shetty). Filling the shoes of America’s sweetheart, Amanda Seyfried, who propelled the ditzy member of the Plastics to pop culture stardom, marked a breakout role for the Columbia University undergraduate. As she charms with her natural on-screen presence and comic prowess, Avantika is elevating her filmography, trading the "Plastic" crown for bloodied tutus and "ballet-fu" in her latest role.
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This spring, Avantika stars in Vicky Jewson’s Pretty Lethal, a ballet-themed survival thriller that recently premiered at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival (SXSW). Released globally on Prime Video on 25 March 2026, the film follows an elite group of ballerinas featuring an all-female ensemble including Dance Moms alum Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor (To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before), Iris Apatow (The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping), and Millicent Simmonds (A Quiet Place). When Uma Thurman’s former dance prodigy character forces them into an upheaval, the girls turn to their pointe shoes for survival, weaponising their dance training as the ultimate self-defence.
As one of the story's core ballerinas, Avantika pivots from the familiar grace and engages in what the cast terms as "ballet-fu". Developed with 87North Production’s stunt team, who previously worked on Bullet Train and The Fall Guy, the ballet and kung fu hybrid fighting realised Jewson’s directorial vision for the main characters’ dance-to-survive arc. “We wanted to make it feel very authentic, and that it's just scrappy, and it is a girl just fighting for survival,” Jewson told Inverse. “And therefore, we can witness the birth of ballet-fu, because if you're pushed up against the wall and it really is life and death, you just go into muscle memory for how to survive. And her muscle memory just happens to be this incredible trained athlete basically of a ballerina.”
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Bringing a new layer of intensity to her latest character highlights Avantika’s versatility as a performer and storyteller, contrasting past projects such as the high-school comedy Senior Year and supernatural horror flick Tarot. The film also arrives as a timely response to the cultural discourse on the relevance of ballet. The ballerinas’ raw embodiment of strength challenges the classical ballet tropes, reframing the dance form as an expression of tough, resilient femininity.
Avantika finds this characterisation vital for audiences of the film while noting the shift in the “final girl” archetype, as the story ends on a united front rather than a single survivor. “I hope young women walk away feeling empowered to embrace harmony and cohesiveness. These are five women shown in an incredibly gritty, empowered, non-sexual light. We don’t get to see female characters like that in action movies, almost ever,” she shared in Variety.
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Away from the big screen, Avantika’s latest appearance is in the music scene. Starring alongside Sean Kaufman (The Summer I Turned Pretty) as the lead in New York-based band WHATMORE’s 2000s Pop Punk R&B music video, she broadens her credits with a new genre. The TikTok viral band’s short feature taps into the revival of early 2000s nostalgia and romance, with the two up-and-coming actors perusing inside and out on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As her cameo starkly departs from her Pretty Lethal bloodied ballerina image, Avantika showcases her range with the diverse roles she continues to take on, which would make her an unsurprising stand-out this season.