A Russo Brothers and Raj & DK collab wasn't on our 2024 bingo list, but it's happening. The director duo, best known for their spy thriller show The Family Man, are coming up with another. Citadel: Honey Bunny, starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Varun Dhawan, is an offshoot of the world of Citadel, the 2023 American espionage series created by the Russo Brothers, which starred Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden. 

Nadia's origin story

Priyanka's character in Citadel's US chapter, Nadia, is inextricably linked to the India chapter since that details her origin story. She's six years old in Raj & DK's period spy show set in India of the 1990s. The decade is no new turf for the director duo, since their Netflix India series Guns & Gulaabs was also steeped in that flavour. “These are two kinds of going back to the ‘90s – one is a pulpy, kitsch, cult-ish thing like Guns & Gulaabs, and another one is going for a very gritty, grounded story with Bollywood of that time as the backdrop. It’s so much fun to go back to the ‘90s – there’s so much to do! Which is also the problem because your story might shift. So we tend to keep it in the backdrop, and not really showcase how '90s was,” says Raj.

For writer Sita Menon, who has been associated with Raj & DK since their 2009 crime comedy 99, it was interesting to keep one eye on Priyanka's character in Citadel US while writing the India chapter. “Because the little Nadia grows up to be Priyanka, we needed to know the traits. It was interesting to see how these two spies shape the philosophy or ideology of Nadia,” she says. “At the same time, we thought this is our chance to create our own spies. The spy is already created there, Nadia, so what if we also create our homegrown spies? We used Nadia to create Honey and Bunny,” adds Raj.

Subverting the spy genre

Taking a pre-existing world and making it their own is the USP of Raj & DK as storytellers. For instance, they took the horrex (horror + sex) genre and turned it into Stree, a scary satire on women empowerment. Or when they took the espionage genre, and churned out The Family Man out of it. Manoj Bajpayee's desi spy Srikant Tiwari is designed as the “James Bond of Chembur.” He may be chasing and fighting formidable bad guys on the streets, but he always has a tough time explaining his absence to folks at home.

“When we came across the idea of the big world of Citadel, the expansive vision, the futuristic action, we again thought we could subvert it from a futuristic setting to a retro setting. It gives us great joy to see what new flavour we can add to something that's already there. We knew there are already going to be 2 chapters of Citadel (US and Italy). By the time there's a third, we wanted to see it's not something that's already out there,” Raj explains. Sita, who wasn't involved in The Family Man, took the subversion brief quite seriously, and took a detour from that show in Citadel: Honey Bunny.

In a key scene we see in the trailer, Samantha's Honey is seen breaking it to her little daughter that she was a spy. That's a far cry from The Family Man and all other espionage shows in which the spy never discloses their identity, even to the family. “This was one of the scenes where, like Raj said, we tried to subvert. Here, it was high time that Honey told her who she was, what her past was. All this time, she was skirting around the issue. She'd feed her daughter all kinds of stories about who she was. She was not really lying, but in that scene, it was important that she revealed her truth,” Sita says. It's clear that even with a globally recognised show like Citadel, Raj, DK, and Sita continue to subvert – even their own past creations.

Citadel: Honey Bunny will premiere on Prime Video India on November 7.

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