‘Citadel’: Amazon’s Big Bet for a Global TV Franchise

Chopra Jonas’s Nadia Sinh is the first character we meet in Citadel. A well-dressed confident woman making her way through a train compartment, Nadia clearly has a mission, and plenty of secrets. The role required that Chopra Jonas not only capture Nadia’s ice-cold demeanor as a spy (“I’m a goofball, so what was the biggest challenge for me was to be really cool,” she says), but it was also a very physical role, with the actress doing many of her own stunts. “This was physically demanding, emotionally demanding, but it’s such a fun show to be a part of,” Chopra Jonas says.

Given her massive fan following in India, Chopra Jonas is well aware of the importance of a global audience. When she first heard Salke’s pitch for Citadel, she says, “It kind of blew my mind. This is something that’s never been attempted on television before, and just the social experiment and the audacity of it was just so exciting to me.”

Chopra Jonas, the Russos, and Weil set out to make the series a true two-hander, with Chopra Jonas and Madden’s characters on an equal playing field as elite spies. “Look, the genre is generally dominated by male leads,” Anthony Russo says. “So, as we were crafting the story and casting and all the way through production, it was very much us figuring out how we keep those two characters competing with one another in terms of their sort of experiences within the narrative.”