There’s a lot about Citadel, Amazon Prime Video’s big-budget spy thriller, that’s familiar.
It has a seemingly altruistic, non-governmental, global spy network, the deftly named Citadel, and its hostile, malicious opposite, Manticore.
There are attractive spies with sexual chemistry. They have some memory issues, a la Jason Bourne, but like Matt Damon’s agent-on-the-run, their physical and mental skills are second-to-none.
It has a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game of secrets, lies and betrayals – and the threat of nuclear annihilation, of course. Oh, and it’s rumoured to have cost $US300 million to make, which you can see in its high-end production values.
But what makes Citadel distinct is not the budget but its ambition. The series, produced by Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo and starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden, is just the first in a planned Citadel universe.
The idea is to make Citadel an international streaming franchise in a way that hasn’t been attempted at the same scale. Law & Order, NCIS and CSI may have cities-based spin-offs but Citadel is going to be global.
Think Citadel: India and Citadel: Italy, which are already in production. You’ll soon forget about Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J running around LA when there’s all of Italy to be the backdrop.
And the spin-offs aren’t just going to be American actors on location, these shows are cast with local actors, designed first for the local market, but with an eye on the rest of the world. The Indian series has already cast Bollywood stars Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu.
The concept matches the global ambitions of multinational streaming services, especially in an era where western markets, especially North America, has reached saturation point.
If you’re looking to anchor your kick-off series, the homebase, if you will, you’re going to need stars with international appeal.
“I think that’s why I was cast,” Chopra Jonas told news.com.au, adding a laugh. “I’ve dipped my feet into various markets, I’ve done a lot of international work and both Richard and I are not American, which makes it really interesting to be helming the show.
“We have very different fan bases and very different audiences.”
Chopra Jonas’ profile and talent is exactly what Citadel needs. The actor and producer was one of the biggest stars in India before she broke out in 2015 in the US in the TV series Quantico, and going on to feature in Baywatch and The Matrix Resurrections.
With a massive following on social media (86 million on Instagram) and brand ambassadorships for Bulgari and Pantene, Chopra Jonas’ soft power crosses borders. She is enormously popular in her homeland, which is now the world’s most populous nation with 1.4 billion people, and is well-known in Western countries.
“I had this conversation with [Amazon Prime Video boss] Jennifer Salke, and she pitched it to me especially because of that. She said, ‘You know, I want you to helm the show because of the international nature of what you bring to the table’. I was very excited about that.”
Chopra understood that TV shows and movies travel everywhere now. She mentioned her own mother is obsessed with Korean dramas and will devour them all night, despite not knowing the language.
“I come from Hindi-language movies and as someone who always hoped to push the envelope of the diaspora and have people watch movies with subtitles, it’s such an exciting time as an actor.
“To now be living in a time where subtitled movies win Best Picture [Oscars] and people are watching things without knowing the language. I would really love to see people who don’t speak specific languages watch it just because they’re interested, and they’re invested in the world.
“As filmmakers and as an industry, we need to lean into making global stories because the globe was become a small place.
“Citadel is ahead of the curve a little bit and we’re embracing true diversity. We can keep talking about diversity and inclusion but in today’s world, it needs to be international. It’s not just about what someone looks like, but about how they sound, what culture they came from, and what food they eat.”
The internationalism of the series is apparent in the first scene, when Chopra Jonas and Madden’s characters cycle through four languages in the span of a minute – English, Mandarin Chinese, German and Spanish – in their sexually charged banter.
For Chopra and Madden, it’s not the metrics of global reach but make Citadel compelling, for them, it starts with their characters. If the people and the story aren’t interesting, then it doesn’t matter how many spin-offs there will be.
Mason Kane (Madden) and Nadia Sinh (Chopra Jonas) have multiple masks, as not just the aliases they’ve taken on, but the versions of themselves where they do and don’t have the memories of their past lives, thanks to a protocol which wiped their recollections.
There’s probably something in that about the parallel between characters with multiple identities and a streaming series with multiple spin-offs.
Madden argued Citadel is different to other spy franchises – including the numerically famous one which he was, at various times, linked to.
“I think it’s completely different, we’re making our own world from the ground up,” the Game of Thrones and Bodyguard star said. “Not only that but Priyanka and I have two characters each, so you really get to see this strange dual dynamic trying to work out who they are and who they are together.
“[The Russos] have an amazing vision, they think way bigger than most people do. This show is not only on multiple continents, in multiple countries, but we have multiple series spanning off of it, an interconnecting world in a way that only they can do.”
Citadel is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video with new episodes available on Fridays
The writer travelled to Mumbai as a guest of Amazon Prime Video