An Amazon thriller starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden is the first in a franchise of interrelated series that will be set, and produced, around the world.
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By Chris Vognar
About five years ago, the head of Amazon Studios, Jennifer Salke, called Anthony and Joe Russo with an idea for a different kind of franchise. It would start with an American-made show then eventually expand into multiple other series, set and produced in other countries and filmed in other languages, all connected within the same storytelling universe on Prime Video.
The Russo Brothers were intrigued. As linchpins of the Marvel empire, having directed two Avengers movies and two Captain America movies, they knew all about international reach; Marvel, after all, reaps much of its enormous profit abroad. And they soon came up with the right vehicle: a fast-paced spy thriller that jets around the world, as such stories already tend to do.
The result, or at least the first step, is the six-part first season of “Citadel,” debuting Friday. The brisk, often violent action drama is about a global spy network, also called Citadel, charged with keeping the world’s peace, often through unpeaceful means. At the center are two agents and smoldering former lovers, Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Mason Kane (Richard Madden), who must fight to save the organization after a nefarious enemy spy group, known as Manticore, nearly wipes Citadel off the map.
But the flagship American series is just the start: Production has wrapped on the Italian “Citadel,” starring Matilda De Angelis (“The Undoing”), and it is already underway on the Indian “Citadel,” featuring the Bollywood star Varun Dhawan. For the Russo brothers, who are executive producers on all three series, the franchise was the logical next step in their world-building (and world-spanning) vision.
“We’ve had the good fortune of being able to tell stories that travel around the globe, and we’ve seen the effect that those can have on audiences,” Anthony Russo said, sitting beside his brother during a video interview last week from London. “But those were Hollywood-centric narratives that traveled. The idea that we could create a story that not only traveled around the world but was created around the world seemed like a very exciting movement forward.”
It is an audaciously ambitious plan, a play for world influence that the warring spies of “Citadel” might recognize. Some of the production challenges are already evident.
“It really is like riding a bucking bronco,” Joe Russo said. “New ideas are always developing because Italy and India are in different timelines of production.” As the other two productions emerge with new ideas, he added, “it’s important for us to adjust and make sure that our Easter eggs and our plot threads are all feeding correctly into future stories.”
David Weil (“Hunters”) replaced the original showrunner, Josh Applebaum, during production. (The Indian and Italian productions have different showrunners.) According to The Hollywood Reporter, reshoots pushed the cost of “Citadel” to more than $200 million, which would make it one of the most expensive series ever made. (Amazon did not respond to multiple queries about the show’s budget.)
The franchise’s international ambitions are apparent immediately in early episodes of the U.S. production. Shooting locations abroad for the first season include London, Morocco and Valencia, Spain. Within the first 10 minutes of the series, Chopra Jonas and Madden banter and bicker in Mandarin, Italian, Spanish and German, a multilingual way to immediately indicate these characters have a past.
Casting was also a crucial part of the international equation. Chopra Jonas is one of India’s most famous actresses, and she has also made a name in the United States (including in the ABC drama “Quantico”). Madden, who played Robb Stark in “Game of Thrones,” is Scottish. The British actress Lesley Manville (“The Crown,” “Phantom Thread”) plays the ruthless Manticore head, Dahlia Archer, who also happens to be the British ambassador to the United States.
The global orientation was a big part of the appeal for Chopra Jonas.
“As someone who worked in the Indian film industry, I always wanted our Hindi language movies to transcend borders and move into other diasporas,” she said last week in a video interview. “You want your movies to always travel.”
She added: “‘Citadel’ is giving an opportunity to filmmakers around the world to play in the same sand pit and have the same opportunities to tell their stories.”
Like “The Bourne Identity” (2002), the first installment in the long-running film series based on the Robert Ludlum novels, “Citadel” turns on a case of amnesia. When, in the pilot, Mason and Nadia nearly die in a fiery train crash, their caustic handler, Bernard (Stanley Tucci), “backstops” them, wiping their memories clean. Mason then spends the next eight years living as another person, Kyle, with a wife (played by the Australian actress Ashleigh Cummings) and young daughter (Caoilinn Springall) and no recollection of his life as a superspy.
Kyle is a nice guy. Mason, not so much. When circumstances conspire to make Mason necessary to Citadel again, the reverse transition makes for a thorny process.
“They share a soul,” Madden said. “Mason is inherently selfish and damaged. Kyle is the opposite of that. He’s surrounded by love. As the show goes on, you get to see more of Mason and how much he actually is craving love and intimacy with someone.”
Here, too, the inherent qualities of the spy genre provided opportunities for deeper exploration. Spies, after all, have no fixed identities: They are many different things to many different people. “Citadel” adds a wrinkle to these already-blurred lines, creating characters whose divided selves go beyond expedient aliases and multiple passports.
Chopra Jonas relished the questions of identity raised by the premise: “How are you going to come to terms with everything that happened in those eight years?” she said. “Who are you as a person now? A culmination of both of those? What kind of humanity do you retain? What about your moral compass? It’s a really delicious unpacking of character.”
With multiple productions based in multiple countries and a narrative universe that thrives on complexity, the “Citadel” project has no shortage of moving parts. It can all get dizzying and demands careful management in order to keep everything coherent and on track. This, Tucci said, is an area where the Russo brothers excel.
“They’re probably the most efficient filmmakers I’ve ever worked with,” said Tucci, who also stars in the Russo-directed sci-fi adventure movie “The Electric State,” scheduled to debut on Netflix next year. “They know exactly what they want. You get in, and you do it, and they’re collaborative. Then you go: ‘OK, 6 o’clock. Time to go home. Did we get everything?’ And they got everything. That just doesn’t happen.”
If the opening salvos connect with audiences, the “Citadel” team hopes to add even more countries and more story lines to the project. If all goes as planned, “Citadel” could attain a reach and scope to match its namesake spy network.
To Madden, it wouldn’t feel right otherwise.
“If we’re trying to make a show about a spy agency that we say exists in every country in the world,” he said, “it only makes sense to have versions of this show from as many countries as we can.”
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