“I think organised crime in any sort of country, and I guess Italy and the moniker mafia, has become synonymous with something,” Gardini says. “But in terms of the Zani family, I think that they represent a very powerful conglomerate that has a monopoly on a commodity that does terrible things, weapons manufacturers.
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“There are a lot of huge multinational corporations in the world that have a monopoly over a certain product, so in a way I don’t think it is so much synonymous with Italy or with organised crime, but with [an examination of] big business in a way,” Gardini says.
Matilda De Angelis as Diana Cavalieri in Citadel: Diana.
Credit: Prime Video
The mothership, Citadel, was launched in 2023. It stars Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra as Citadel agents Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh, whose world is blown apart when a rival agency, Manticore, orchestrates a mass attack on Citadel’s agents around the world, leaving the organisation and the world missing the one force who can keep Manticore’s sinister plans in check.
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In that sense, Citadel is a very traditional spy thriller well from which the two new series spring. It plays with somewhat conventional genre tools, including a sort of anti-M villainess in Dahlia (Lesley Manville), the mastermind behind Manticore, and a gizmo-expert Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), the keeper of the sleeve up which all of Citadel’s tricks are hidden.
Overall, the Citadel franchise is steered by Anthony and Joe Russo, the creative partnership behind some of the pivotal chapters in the timeline of Marvel’s The Avengers, who say they came to the Citadel concept as a result of the globalisation of production they found at Marvel.
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“We’ve always tried to push ourselves creatively into spaces that we feel like are new and fresh and different and allow us to find ways to express ourselves as filmmakers in ways that are unexpected for us, and hopefully unexpected for audiences,” Anthony Russo says.
“One of the things we learned as we were making the Marvel movies, we really had this experience where we were having this global dialogue with audiences, with these films where people from every corner of the world were participating in watching those movies, talking about those movies, engaging with those movies.”
Critical to the development of both new Citadel series’ was finding and nurturing relationships with other filmmakers, that is, Italian writer Alessandro Fabbri and showrunner Gina Gardini for Diana, and Indian writer/directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K., known professionally as Raj & DK, for Honey Bunny.
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Richard Madden as Mason Kane, Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Nadia Sinh in the mothership, Citadel.Credit: Amazon Prime
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“We started as low-budget indie filmmakers who came up through film festivals, and those are amazing forums for dialogues between audiences and filmmakers,” Anthony Russo says. “What we hope to do with this show is move that dialogue, expand that dialogue, outside the realm of just audience and filmmaker, but between filmmaker and filmmaker.
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“That was the innovation we hoped for, that we could actually dialogue with other artists globally about the creation of storytelling,” Anthony says. “This show was like a grand experiment in how you share storytelling with other artists around the world, other creative minds, and what that does to the expression stylistically on a content level in terms of what the shows are saying.”
The pair also have a great passion for spies and spy thrillers, Joe Russo adds. “Spies are duplicitous and usually hiding secrets; they’re complex characters,” he says. “When you lean into the human emotions behind those characters, you can get really textured conflict.
“The most exciting thing for us about diving into the spy space was the fine line between truth and lies and heroes and villains,” Joe Russo says. “We like great characters that are morally grey, that are morally complicated, that make decisions based on a code.
“But the code is a complicated code and heroes and villains in the spy space, some heroes make decisions to save others, but it costs lives to do that,” Joe Russo adds. “And villains make decisions to take lives. But when you examine it closely, it’s two sides of the same coin. That is interesting, fertile territory for us.”
Citadel: Diana airs on Amazon Prime Video from October 10.
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