Karan Johar-hosted Amazon Prime Video’s reality show The Traitors Season 1 premiered with 20 participants from the acting and content creation space. The season concluded with Uorfi Javed and Nikita Luther emerging as winners. Now, with Season 2 officially announced, SCREEN caught up with casting director Karan Mallay, who, along with his former partner Nandini Srikent, led the audition process for the show. Karan also shared his insights on what made The Traitors a uniquely different reality show.
Talking about The Traitors being compared to Bigg Boss, Karan said, “I don’t think The Traitors is another Bigg Boss. No disrespect to Bigg Boss, but The Traitors is a very intelligent game. You have to be smart to play it. People loved Elnaaz or Purav because they were intelligent, not because they shouted. Uorfi won the show because of her smartness; it wasn’t easy for her to convince them that she was innocent. You had to constantly use your brains.”
Recalling the brief he and Nandini received before they cast for The Traitors, Karan shared, “We got briefs from both Amazon and BBC, and it was very clear. They wanted a very fresh cast. A bunch of 20 people who have not been seen in this space together like this. They wanted it to look different and not like any other reality show that came before. The main filter was that the contestants had to be intelligent enough to play the game and wanted to play the game. We met a lot of interested people, but they treated it like just another show, which was something we didn’t want. But intelligence was one main criterion.”
Karan Mallay also spoke about Apoorva Mukhija’s statements on the makers and how the shortlisting worked. When he was told that in one of her vlogs, Apoorva mentioned that the makers were not very convinced with her participation in the show, Karan said, “We all knew that Apoorva Mukhija was going to be amazing on the show. She was an interesting person, and seemed smart enough.” He added, “Each one of us had to be convinced about the contestants, and it was a collaborative interview that we did. We had multiple rounds of discussions with Amazon, BBC, creators, Nandini, and me. We discussed everybody, and by the end, we knew who was there and why. There was never like, let’s try them.”
Karan further recalled that, initially, they faced some resistance from celebrities when it came to signing up for the show. He said, “We did face a little bit of resistance from the talents initially. Unfortunately, so many other reality shows in the past have not matched up to the expectations both in India and abroad. They have set a trend of being a certain way, where you are expected to yell, abuse, and have a random love story; maybe now people are bored with it. So when we contact an artiste, they are like, ‘Why should we do it? It’s going to be the same old thing, and I am not interested.’ But we would then tell them what the game is, and they would then get excited because a lot of people have played this game in some way.”
He even recalled how they thought Harsha Gujral and Maheep Kapoor would turn down the show. “When we met all of them, there were people who said no, and there were some people who thought they might not say yes. That happened a lot. People who we thought might not buy it were very happy to meet and engage in the conversation. Quite a few of them were also in the lineup. I didn’t know if Harsh Gujral would say yes or not. I didn’t know him personally; we had never met. Even Maheep and Anshula Kapoor, for that matter.”
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Although The Traitors Season 2 has already been announced, Karan Mallay is uncertain whether he will be involved in the casting process.
