When Aamir Khan’s brother Faissal Khan ‘gave up’ after films flopped: ‘Went to producers, but work stopped coming’

After back-to-back flops Madhosh and Mela, Aamir Khan’s brother, Faissal Khan, stopped getting work. He is now set to stage a comeback with a film called Faactory, which he directed and also stars in.

In a 2015 interview, Faissal spoke about how his career was impacted by the critical and commercial failure of his first two films. He said after some time, he simply decided to stop pursuing opportunities.

He told Bollywood Hungama, “After Mela didn’t do well, I was not getting good offers — offers that an actor wants, to work with a big banner, with a good director. Unfortunately, Madhosh, my first film also did not do well at the box office. And secondly, Mela came, which was a very big film at that time, even that didn’t do well, so naturally, my market value as an actor came down.”

He continued, “So then I went to a lot of producers, searching for work, asking them for work. Because in Mela, I had got some recognition as an actor. So I went out to producers and didn’t get work. So after six months I realised I would not get any big banners that I wished to work with. So then I chose to do some small films. Some of them released and made some profit, which is good, but some films stopped, because of some mishap… So then work only stopped coming, because the market thought that none of my films are getting made or being released. So I had to face all that. Then I turned to TV, I did a serial called Aandhi. Then, because my films didn’t release, I decided I didn’t want to do any smaller films. I stopped working, as an actor. I just gave up as an actor.”

Also read: Twinkle Khanna shares Mela tribute on back of a truck, quips it ‘has certainly left a mark or a scar’ on her and entire country

Faissal joined Aamir Khan Productions, where he worked as a script doctor. Mela is often spoken about as the butt of a joke, even by Twinkle Khanna, who quit acting shortly afterwards. Responding to a tweet by historian and writer Ramchandra Guha, in which he had written that a planned Ram Navami mela in Ayodhya ‘must be stopped’ amid the coronavirus pandemic, she had written in a tweet last year, “Melas, by and large, can be hazardous to health- I would know :).”