Citadel will premiere with two episodes exclusively on Prime Video on Friday, April 28, followed by a new episode released weekly. The highly anticipated action-spy thriller series is executive produced by the Russo Brothers’ AGBO and showrunner David Weil. The cast includes Richard Madden, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Stanley Tucci, and Lesley Manville.
Eight years ago, Citadel fell. The independent global spy agency—tasked to uphold the safety and security of all people—was destroyed by operatives of Manticore, a powerful syndicate manipulating the world from the shadows. With Citadel’s fall, elite agents Mason Kane (Richard Madden) and Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) had their memories wiped as they narrowly escaped with their lives. They’ve remained hidden ever since, building new lives under new identities, unaware of their pasts. Until one night, when Mason is tracked down by his former Citadel colleague, Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), who desperately needs his help to prevent Manticore from establishing a new world order. Mason seeks out his former partner, Nadia, and the two spies embark on a mission that takes them around the world in an effort to stop Manticore, all while contending with a relationship built on secrets, lies, and a dangerous-yet-undying love.
Citadel is the debut of a landmark global franchise. Citadel and its subsequent series traverse the globe with interconnected stories. Each show is locally created, produced, and filmed in-region.
I recently had the chance to attend the show’s virtual trailer launch event with a press conference featuring Richard Madden, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, The Russo Brothers, and David Weil to hear more about Citadel.
After watching the trailer, Richard Madden said, “I think it’s electric. It just captures everything that we want the show to be and gets me so excited to share the rest of it ‘cause that’s just the smallest tease of what the whole show has to offer.”
Priyanka Chopra Jonas continued by expressing, “I think the show has so many layers and complexities and there’s a word that we used from the beginning which was duality for every character. What you see is what you don’t get. Don’t believe what you see. Everything is just conceptually crazy and it’s just so exciting to be able to share it with the world because it’s been a long time in the making because it’s so ambitious. And I’m very excited about it.”
Joe Russo explained, “This is a really unique television event and I think that’s what excites Anthony and I the most about it. The concept was an idea that Jen Salke presented to us a few years ago. The notion of telling a story that could be interwoven throughout the world. It would have a flagship show and then regional shows, you know, written, produced, and directed by regional talent that could interweave with the flagship
show. And we thought that, one, that was such a novel idea for a narrative. And, two, an amazing way to create a really diverse global community of storytellers to tell a giant mosaic of a narrative together. After our work on the Marvel films and spending so much time traveling the globe, this was an idea I think that was really exciting to Anthony and I and ignitable for us, and seemed like an incredible challenge.”
“True to the genre, there are some very, very large set pieces throughout the series. I would argue competitive with the cinematic exploration,” David Weil shared. “And that was the mission here was to bring large-scale spy storytelling to Amazon and to digital distribution. So, that’s the exciting part of it for us is the scale of the action sequences and the ambition it took to execute those.”
“I mean, I think this show is like, capitalizing on two very exciting trends that we’ve seen in storytelling over the past several years, which is, we’ve all been developing a strong passion for narrative universes that have a sprawling expression to them, an interconnected years-long expression to them, where characters change and morph and move between different iterations,” Anthony Russo voiced. “At the same time, we’ve seen this rise in global filmmaking and the ability of non-English language movies and shows to travel to other cultures, and typically the more English language-dominated cultures. So this show is almost kind of taking those two trends and smashing them together for the first time, which is exciting.”
