Paused work on two films for ‘The Family Man’: Raj and DK

“The Family Man” creators Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK say they decided to take a leap of faith by venturing into the long format with “The Family Man” and are now happy that the risk paid off in a big way.

Known for hits such as crime comedy “99”, “Shor in the City” and “Go Goa Gone”, the filmmaker duo, collectively known to audiences as Raj & DK, were working on a film and prepping for another but decided to pause them for the Prime Video series, which became a runaway hit on the platform after its premiere in 2019. A second season came out in 2021 and was also universally praised.

“The Family Man”, which is set to return with its third season on Friday, revolves around Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee), who is a regular family man but unknown to his wife and children, he works as government agent trying to unmask terror plots.

Looking back, the directors, who also wrote the hit horror-comedy “Stree” in 2018, are happy that they took the risk.

“We had to pause on the film we were working on at that time, and the next film, and said we want to do long format. We wanted to do this story, we even had ‘Farzi’ at that time, but we chose this, and said to ourselves, ‘We should go into this’.

“Not many filmmakers were venturing into long format. So, I’m really glad we did take this detour into long format, and it paid off so well. It became so loved and widely known. Even in interiors, people’s faces light up after so many years (because of ‘The Family Man’). So, you know you’ve done something that you should be proud of. It gave us another dimension for the kind of stories we get to tell,” Nidimoru told PTI.

DK, who along with his creative partner, went on to make OTT shows like “Farzi”, “Guns & Gulaabs” and “Citadel: Honey Boney”, said it is always a challenge to surprise the audience and yet give them something familiar with the story.

“(The challenge is) to be able to surprise you as much as you were surprised in the first season, but also not lose the thing about the early seasons that you’ve watched,” he added.

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“We want everybody to watch the third season. It has been a long wait. We want that wait to be worth it, and if people watch it, and if they like it, that’s step number one. But what I really want is for them to say, ‘This is even better than season one and two’, then that would be like, ‘Wow’. So, hoping for the best,” DK said.

For the third chapter, one of the hurdles the creators faced was casting the antagonist and after an extensive search, they finally settled on “Pataal Lok” star Jaideep Ahlawat for the role of Rukma.

Nimrat Kaur, who is another new entrant to the show, is also stepping into the negative role, alongside Darshan Kumar who returns as Major Sameer, a Pakistani ISI agent.

“We had a plot, but we did not have the right antagonist that took a long time. So, we had to kind of leave it there, go do something else, come back and then somewhere we kind of cracked it and then we were all excited. What took so long is that we realized that the antagonists were actually making a mark, there was an expectation. We didn’t think about it earlier but with season three, we had to think.

“Also, we wanted to bring a fresh angle from the antagonist’s side because we’ve seen two distinctly different antagonists earlier, and how do we up that and do better? You need to let the mind wander for a bit for it to come up with an idea,” Nidimoru added.

“The Family Man 3 also brings back actors Sharib Hashmi, Priyamani, Ashlesha Thakur, Vedant Sinha, Shreya Dhanwanthary, and Gul Panag.