Key Points
Recorded first audition in hotel bathroom during Mussoorie holiday
Show became biggest hit on JioHotstar
Neeraj Pandey launched Tacker's career
Released during first COVID-19 lockdown
The actor, who essayed the role of a lead cop in the show, shared that he recorded his first audition for the show inside a hotel’s washroom.
Talking about the same, he said, “Well, I can't believe it’s been five years since ‘Special Ops’ was released. I still remember the first day when I got called for the audition. I was on a holiday in Mussoorie. I remember recording the audition from there in a bathroom of a hotel because my hotel room didn’t have enough light to record a good audition and then it was tough to send it through because there is no network in the mountains”.
He shared, Finally, when I was able to send it I remember him calling me the next day and being like, ‘can you fly today because sir really likes the audition’, and I immediately remember buying a ticket and rushing to Mumbai for another round of audition and will never forget the day when Neeraj Sir called me to his office to just have a small chat with me to get to know me better”.
The show was released on Jiohotstar on the day when India lockdown was announced back in 2020, and the team didn’t get the opportunity to promote the show. Considering OTT was a fairly new medium back then, their stress was justified.
He further mentioned, “We never got an opportunity to promote the show at all so we didn’t do any on-ground promotional activity, we didn’t do any interviews, no press conference, nothing, and we were all quite stressed about how it will be received considering OTT was very new at that moment and without any noise about the show we weren’t sure how it might turn out”.
He continued, “But I really have to credit the audience for the love in abundance that they showered on ‘Special Ops’ that till date it’s the biggest show of JioHotstar and still gets so much love every time I meet someone who’s a fan they constantly asked me, ‘What should we call you, Faruk or Amjad or Karan?’ I feel very humbled and indebted to Neeraj sir for really setting up my career because after that there’s been ‘Khakee: The Bihar Chapter’”.
“There’s been the second season of ‘Special Ops’, and I truly believe that all of the work that I’ve done with Neeraj Pandey and Friday Filmworks has helped me gain credibility today as an actor and as an artist so this show, the release of this date will always hold a lot of importance for me”, he added.
