If James Bond is the world’s best spy, imagine how his parents would be. This logline sparked the idea for Citadel: Honey Bunny, a new spy series from the quirk-house of Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK. Their previous espionage outing The Family Man was also once described by DK as about 007 being a middle-class man, living in Mumbai’s Chembur.
“We seem to have a fixation,” says DK with a laugh. Raj is quick to vent his vexation with the man who has the licence to kill. “He is the biggest trope in the spy genre. The smartest, most suave guy in the room who can get out of every situation,” he says. “A tall, lanky man wearing cool suits and having a signature drink (“shaken, not stirred”). Is he really a camouflaging spy? You see him on screen and you will be like, wait, who’s that guy?”
Raj and DK’s desi spies are more inconspicuous. Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Varun Dhawan are Honey and Bunny, a struggling actor and a mullet-sporting stuntman in 90s Bollywood who moonlight as secret agents. The show is the Indian offshoot of the US espionage series Citadel, headlined by Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden.
In the trailer, Honey and Bunny are shown to have a young daughter named Nadia, the same as Priyanka’s character, connecting the show to the mothership series. Samantha’s kicks and chops in the second season of The Family Man might have served as an audition reel for Honey Bunny but this is Varun’s maiden project with Raj and DK, also his first all-out actioner.
“Before this, I had done psychological thriller/action in Badlapur (2015) or something more comical in Dishoom (2016). This was more of a you-mean-business kind of action. The training, however, was mostly about the mindset. For example, I am not supposed to smile while hitting people,” says Varun with a grin. In the trailer he is seen slipping into dapper corduroy jackets, wearing a bandana and going off stunt ramps on a dirt bike. “He plays a stunt double to Ajay Devgn in the 90s,” informs DK.
‘Smartphones have become supporting characters’
For Samantha, this time, the kicking and punching didn’t come easy. The actor was suffering from dermatomyositis, a muscle inflammatory disorder, while she was filming for the series. “When I see it (the action sequences), I can’t believe I actually did it,” she says.
“There were times when I had an IV in my arm in the morning and we were shooting intense combat scenes in the afternoon.” Raj butts in with a laugh, “She lay there with a drip going and outside we were discussing how to stage the scene. Then I would go into the room and ask her ‘Can you do it?’ and she said ‘I don’t know’. Next thing you know, I said ‘Action!’, and she is jumping from one place to another.” Varun adds, “I don’t think most actors on set even knew what she was going through.”
Since their debut directorial 99, the 90s era seems to enthral Raj and DK as creators. Their previous show Guns and Gulaabs was also set in the pre-internet era, filled with the nostalgia of audio cassettes and STD phone booths. Honey Bunny is also set in the pre-mobile phone era. “The point was to take the tech away,” says Raj.
“With everybody having a smartphone these days, surveillance has become so easy. We wanted to get away from that and make it gritty and grounded. Nostalgia was of course, a flavour.” Apart from love for the 90s, there also seems to be an undercurrent of disdain for cell phones in the works of Raj and DK. In 99, Kunal Kemmu and Cyrus Broacha play crooks who hate mobile phones but are in the business of duplicating sim cards.
They have an amusing catchphrase which translates to: “Mobile’s radiation causes cancer. Put it on your ear and your brain is finished. Put it in your shirt pocket and your heart is finished and if you put it in your trouser pocket then generation…finished.” In The Family Man, the most joyous scenes are of Manoj Bajpayee shouting expletives over a phone call.
“We were the first generation to use mobile phones. People used to give each other missed calls all the time because calling rates were so expensive. Now this thing (mobile) is like a computer in your hands, but back then it used to be silly like that,” says DK. “We didn’t realise,” adds Raj, before continuing, “But somewhere in our journey cell phones became supporting characters.”