Move over James Bond: next week, Prime Video’s action thriller Citadel hits television screens, and it promises just as many (if not more) explosions, double-crossing and continent-hopping as anything Ian Fleming could conjure up.
Instead of watching 007 drink martinis and fight bad guys, this show features two protagonists, both spies, who are battling both bad guys and – why not – memory loss in their pursuit of the truth. Naturally, it’s also star-studded.
“Oftentimes, we see shows that are 80 per cent drama, 20 per cent action, or vice versa,” Richard Madden says. “This show aimed to be 100 per cent of both.”
Madden (best known as Robb Stark on Game of Thrones, and the conflicted David Budd, PPO to Keeley Hawes’s Home Secretary Julia Montague in Bodyguard) plays one of the show’s protagonists, Mason Kane: a man who was a Citadel agent, but who had his memory wiped when the agency fell eight years previously thanks to a mole named Manticore.
In the years since, the blissfully unaware Mason has moved on and started a family – but of course, the past doesn’t stay buried for long and soon the agency’s director Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci) is knocking on his door.
For the rest of the season, Mason must attempt to recover his past memories – while flashbacks show the audience the kind of person he used to be. Was it hard, playing two versions of the same character? Not at all, he says; in fact, it was a “joy.”
“They are both the same man in lots of different ways, but in each version of them, you pull out different aspects of humanity and who we are as people,” he says.
The Mason we meet at the start of the show, sans memories, is untroubled and carefree, while the other (who slowly emerges as the episodes go by) is burdened by a considerable amount of trauma. “That’s kind of what was exciting to explore,” explains Madden, whose character in Bodyguard was also suffering from PTSD. “How much of your character traits are built into you, and how much is inherited through trauma and experience?”
If this sounds like a lot to be getting on with, it is. As the show’s “Creative Spymaster” and showrunner David Weil puts it, “there’s a lot going on” – and there’s more to come. In addition to launching this series, Amazon has a whole roster of Citadel spin-off series in the works, each focussing on the agents based in a different country.
“What’s so beautiful and ambitious about this entire spy-verse that we’re creating is that we’re doing it in tandem with partners all around the world. We have announced the India series and the Italy series… it [will become] this tapestry told in different languages through different cultures in a very authentic way.”
“It’s not just a Western point of view that we’re viewing the story through, but we’re really doing something original.”
As Joe Russo (one of the executive producers, alongside brother Anthony) expands: “it’s a very fast-paced show, it’s very sexy, it’s got great energy, moves really quickly, you have to keep up with it, and nothing is as it seems.
“The entire time you’re trying to figure out who is the mole that sold out Citadel, and it’s built around a really explosive conceit, and it’s the kind of stuff we like to watch. It’s relentless, and it doesn’t really give you a break.”
Though it’s not destined for the big screen, that hasn’t stopped the creators behind Citadel from throwing the kitchen sink and then some at the show: there are explosions, high-octane skiing sequences and a train fight in the first episode, which might well be destined to go down in history as one of television’s best.
“Our stunt team was incredible,” says Madden’s co-star Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who plays another former Citadel agent, Nadia. “I really think Nadia’s character’s a badass, and she comes from a place of trusting her body, and her instincts. I got to explore a lot of that with the stunts that we did,” .
“Every time I would read new pages, the stunts would just get bigger and bigger and bigger. It was amazing to be able to imagine that and then walk in the set and actually execute it. It was great.”
Her character Nadia Sinh runs into Mason on the aforementioned train – and has also had her mind wiped.
“Nadia carries a lot of baggage. She has to navigate really thick waters, you know?” she says. “I think that that makes her very juicy as a character for me to play because every choice that is made by her is burdened and laden by so much pressure.”
The show’s aim is to marry the epic action sequences of episode one and beyond with the relationship between Nadia and Mason. And with Citadel about to hit screens, what is it about the spy genre that excites audiences so much? For Weil, it’s all about the escapism.
“I think we all wear masks in our lives, right? There are many depths and dimensions, and facets to each of us,” he says.
“To be able to see on-screen characters who embody that spirit and sort of give you that wish fulfilment is always exciting. I think this show allows the viewer to sort of step into the world of Citadel and feel like they, too, are an agent within it.”
