‘Citadel’ Stars Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas Open Up About Their Scintillating Onscreen Energy: We “Bring Out the Best in Each Other”

Prime Video‘s new thriller Citadel opens with sexy super spy Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) discovering, to her chagrin, that she has company on her latest secret mission. Fellow Citadel field agent Mason Kane (Richard Madden) flirtatiously takes a seat next to Nadia and it’s immediately clear these two spies have tussled in between the sheets before. Madden and Chopra Jonas have a fun, feisty chemistry that helps Citadel seduce its audience into submission.

In many ways, Citadel is just a paint-by-numbers spy thriller. There’s a good spy group, Citadel, that is suddenly undone by a bad spy group, Manticore. Almost all the Citadel agents are killed, except for a small handful scattered all over the world. Both Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh barely escape the purge, but both lose their memories in the process. So when Citadel loyalist Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci) finally tracks them down eight years later, it’s, uh, unclear how useful they’re going to be against the all-powerful Manticore.

Whether they’re bantering in flashbacks or struggling to survive in the present day timeline, actors Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas elevate Citadel‘s source material with their explosive chemistry. Citadel executive producer Joe Russo said that there were ironically no chemistry reads for the actors before they were cast. The production just lucked out.

“No, it’s interesting. I mean they were just actors that we loved, that both my brother [Anthony Russo] and I, we’ve been tracking for years,” Russo told Decider. “We’re very actor forward in our work.”

“We keep lists when we watch performances of people and mental notes of who we want to work with. And after we saw Bodyguard with Madden we were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to work with him.’ We set up a meeting with him, we got to know him, and then Citadel came along, it seemed like the perfect expression of him as an actor.”

“Same with Priyanka,” Russo said. “She has an incredible ability to have real depth and emotion and real physical intensity and it’s so hard to find an actor that can encapsulate both of those, and we’re lucky we have two that can do that.”

“It’s great working with Priyanka because she’s so present,” Richard Madden told Decider. “She’s so there. She’s so tactile and ready to pivot and adapt and change on the day, which we need to when we’re creating a show from scratch, when we don’t have a source material. We’ve just got this to do.”

“Priyanka being so present and so ready to improvise and dance with me. Not to sound pretentious, but in these fight sequences, they are like dances, and you’ve got to be able to click into each other’s rhythm. And we, I think, bring the best out of each other in that regard.”

Part of the challenge that Madden and Chopra Jonas had to navigate on Citadel is that Madden basically plays two different characters. There’s his smooth and confident super spy, Mason Kane, and then there’s Kyle Conroy. Stripped of his memories, Mason spends eight quiet years as a family man. When he finally reunites with Nadia, Mason is hopeless in a fight outside of flashes of muscle memory.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas told Decider that while she “really enjoyed” working opposite Madden as Mason Kane, she loved the dynamic between “Kyle” and Nadia, even if her character disagreed…

“Nadia didn’t like when Kyle was around because he’s such a liability to her. She’s like, ‘What am I supposed to do with you? You don’t have your skillset, like why are you here?'” Chopra Jonas said. “And I really enjoy that dynamic very much because you usually see the physical heavy lifting of, or the spy stuff of this genre, being done by guys predominantly and in this one it’s Nadia who does it.”

“Intentionally, the writers sort of flipped that. It was really cool.

Madden, on the other hand, preferred playing Mason to Kyle, in part because of how it affected his chemistry with another co-star: Stanley Tucci. Madden was paired with Tucci during interviews and the American actor had opinions of his own about working with his Scottish co-star.

Madden said, “I think later in the series you get to see Mason and Bernard, Stanley’s character, interacting, and for me those days were so fun because these two guys have an energy and an intelligence. They jab at each other and that was really fun to do with Stanley on the day.” 

“Yeah, I liked both of his characters,” Tucci said, “because, you know, you’re playing in different ways with either of them, you know, with both of them. So, you know, whereas Mason is very sort of snarky and —”

“Miserable,” Madden said. 

“Miserable. And —”

“Hateful,” Madden said. 

“Arrogant,” Tucci said.

“Arrogant, yeah.”

“Which is great to play with, and you can never quite get there because he’s constantly just hitting at you,” Tucci said. “The other character’s just fun because of his — not fun, that’s the wrong to say — because he’s so fearful and confused. There’s something quite charming about that.”

And there’s something about Citadel‘s quite charming cast helps sell the sillier parts of the show.

The first two episodes of Citadel are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes will premiere weekly on Fridays.