Shalini Bathina Talks ‘Little Voice’ Season 1 and Her Character’s Struggle to Come Out [Exclusive Interview]

The Apple TV+ dramedy Little Voice is about a young singer/songwriter named Bess (Brittany O’Grady) trying to “make it” in Manhattan while balancing some serious family responsibilities.

But the show’s heart doesn’t have a center — it beats through every character in this messy fairytale. 

I got to talk to Shalini Bathina — who plays Bess’s best friend Prisha — about the pressures of representing two marginalized communities on TV (Prisha is a South Asian member of the LBGTQIA community), Prisha’s struggle to come out, and some of the details of Prisha’s story that we don’t get to see on screen in Season 1.  

The depth of the representation that the series commits to is clear on Little Voice Season 1 Episode 3, “Dear Hope” when Prisha is the victim of a hate crime while she’s kissing her girlfriend in public and must go to the hospital. 

Bathina’s family was visiting set the day the hate crime scene was filmed. “I was in it, and I was performing and worried about so many other things,” she said, citing the challenge of working with fake blood.

“I actually talked to my sister after and she was like, ‘It was really difficult to watch that… to see you get hurt that way and hear those words. It strikes the heart in a different way.'” 

Bathina said she only felt the full impact of the scene while watching the episode herself. But playing a character that is a member of two marginalized communities comes with a responsibility that she’s taken seriously from the start. 

“I did feel a certain amount of pressure, obviously,” Bathina stated. “Representation right now is not the norm, it’s the exception. Part of the pressure is that there’s this expectation that one story should reflect all stories, but it’s impossible to do that.” 

Bathina hasn’t had the same struggles that Prisha has, so she relied on Little Voice‘s writing, the crew, and her cast members help her understand “the heart and core of this human being and these relationships she has with everyone else around her.”

Prisha’s relationship with her parents is especially complex. They put otherwise mundane sentences in the form of a question — Jeopardy! style —  and have the most infectious joy of any characters on the show. But Prisha is scared to come out to them, and they expect their daughter to agree to an arranged marriage with a man.

“I have seen this in so many people’s relationships with their families, where their parents are lovely human beings, kind, genuinely wonderful people but [with the subject of their child’s LGBTQIA identity] that is something that they’re just not used to,” Bathina said. “It’s something that’s not part of their world.”

Throughout Little Voice Season 1, Prisha is newly out, having only told Bess her secret because her best friend witnesses the hate crime. 

“I think Prisha, at the back of her head, at the core of her heart, knows that [telling her parents] is not going to be an easy experience, even though they are loving… It’s not going to be a clean journey,” Bathina explained.

Being the victim of a hate crime caused Prisha to fear coming out before she has tried on her own, but when she does come out to her sister, it’s clear that her sister is more concerned with being asked to keep a secret from their parents than she is about making Prisha feel loved. 

“Her sister has always been the one who was a little bit more traditional, who listened to her parents, who was open to an arranged marriage, who was leaning into the more conservative ideology,” Bathina noted, explaining the sisters’ relationship. “So, I think off the bat, they’re just different people.” 

As close as her family appears, all of this means that Prisha needs a sister who understands her just as much as Bess does. “Bess accepts Prisha for everything that she is.”

Prisha’s Season 1 story is more about her struggle to come out than her relationship with her girlfriend Ananya (Nadia Mohebban), though their love is evident from the few scenes that they share.

“We hung out a lot, and we understood how we moved with each other and how we talked to each other and kind of brought in our own relationship into Prisha and Ananya’s.”

“We really tried to create a real relationship between us because we knew how limited our interaction was on screen. So as much as we could, those moments that we got to do — we tried to make the most of those scenes.” 

In case you’re wondering, Bathina and Mohebban imagine that Prisha and Ananya organically fell in love over coffee after band practice, having been friends for a long time.

Although they are on good terms by the end of the series, Prisha and Ananya’s relationship status may eventually depend once again on Prisha’s resolution to tell her parents about her sexuality. 

Only time and (and hopefully Season 2 of Little Voice) will tell, but Bathina has one specific wish for Prisha’s future.

“I really hope that she is able to tell [the rest of] her family and navigate that with as much strength and courage [as possible]…but I think it’s going to be a difficult journey,” she said. “As of now she has Bess by her side and I really hope they take care of each other.” 

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Little Voice is currently streaming on on Apple TV+.

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