EXCLUSIVE | 'Panchayat' actor Faisal Malik: 'We incurred heavy losses during season two of the show because...'

Season three of Panchayat is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. It has received some remarkable reviews ever since it started streaming and in an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the director of the series Deepak Kumar Mishra and actor Faisal Malik spoke about the world they created, challenges while shooting, and the idea behind the casting.

Edited excerpts from the interview

Deepak, how much do you feel the world of Panchayat has evolved from season one to season three?

Not only the story, but even the world of the show has evolved a lot over the years. Panchayat is facing very different kind of situation in this season. Every character of the show has evolved a lot. Raghubir Yadav’s character is very fatherly who wants every person in the village to be settled. Neena Gupta’s character has evolved a lot, and Faisal Malik has transformed from comedy to drama. This is an evolution that will keep happening on every state of the story.

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Faisal, do you see any similarities between you and the character you have played?

I read everything that was written on people and I have seen a lot of people like the character I play in my village. So you hold somebody’s hand like the person you’re playing and move forward.

Deepak, how different do you feel Panchayat 3 is as compared to the last season?

In this season, you are going to see a very different kind of face of the village of India. This is the face where the democracy is developing itself on the grass root level. You won’t require any tissue papers in this season. There’s no crying or whining this time. There is a lot of fun to be had in this season with situational humor; but that situation is also very haunting at many places.

Faisal, what were the challenges you faced with the whole team during the making of the first two seasons as we were in the middle of the pandemic?

One of the challenges was the heat. There were no other major challenges because we had a set world and we had to stay around that set world. Because of the rains during the shooting of the second season, we are running 10 to 12 days behind schedule and incurred a lot of loss as we were unable to shoot. Will literally had to use fans to dry the wet lens.

Deepak, what were the discussions that happened during the casting of the show?

When you write something, you automatically start thinking about 4-5 people that you would want to cast. There were a lot of names that popped up that I wouldn’t want to name. Eventually, the people that I cast fit the bills very strongly. I narrated the idea to Neena Gupta and she really liked the strong woman character that I narrated to her. For Faisal’s character, we needed somebody who was really serious, and somebody who didn’t really speak much and only spoke about the pressing issues. Me and my writer were watching a video of Faisal from Gangs Of Wasseypur and it was so striking, we rewrote his whole character. There’s a whole journey between writing and casting and it’s only then when you’re able to cast the right people.