Akarsh Khurana: Cast came back with renewed curiosity

A still from the series

It took director Akarsh Khurana one-and-a-half-year to follow through with the success of Mismatched season one with the second instalment. The gap in between, he believes, has helped the cast and crew, including himself, "grow and mature". The recently-dropped season of the relationship drama takes off the morning after Dimple - Prajakta Kohli's character - kisses Harsh (Vihaan Samat) after breaking up with Rishi played by Rohit Saraf.

Akarsh Khurana

Khurana believes that everyone changed during the pandemic. "It was difficult to dissociate the change in people from what would have happened if they had a normal graph," says the director, adding that his cast also had to recover from the "overwhelming response of season one". "It was a strange homecoming for everybody." While everyone had garnered work in the interim, when talks of the second edition began, Khurana hoped to rekindle the spirit of the Netflix series by organising a team lunch. "It was important to set that tone and equation again. The impact of that passage of time is seen in the show," says Khurana, adding, "Even though they were playing the same characters, they came back with a renewed curiosity. That was important to keep the spirits up more than anything else."

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Having been a writer himself, Khurana understood the challenges of following a successful show with another edition. The director claims that one of the important stages of writing was when the cast was asked to give their inputs in their respective character graphs. "I think the writing of the second season was an interesting process. We had to take the story forward and do justice to every character that the audience had identified with. We couldn't be negligent." While Khurana would have preferred that "his actors not have a strong opinion" on the script, he accepts, that their input added value to the story. "They know the characters better than me. All the actors were given a chance to comment about what they thought their [character's] journeys should be like. That was a great stage of writing. They were now not just our babies, we have created monsters, and now we had to listen to those monsters," he jokes.