In the first scene of Amazon Prime Video’s new spy-tech thriller Citadel, Priyanka Chopra Jonas oozes red. At 41, after a decade-long Hollywood hustle, her real Hollywood moment is here — and it’s a fiery red. The first scene of this series has her sashaying inside a hurtling train in a fiery-red, wool-cady, cut-out dress by designer Sergio Hudson. She plays Nadia Sinh, a spy for an organisation called Citadel — “the last line of defence for good in the world” — and is on a mission. She purrs into the ears of her co-spy at Citadel, Mason Kane (Richard Madden) — switching from bland Italian (yes, the writers of this series can actually make Italian conversations bland!) to some really ratty English dialogues, all meant to evoke familiar banter.
The series has all the tropes of a Hollywood spy thriller from the ’80s, except here, the sought-after, in-hiding, in-captivity sleuths have micro chips embedded in their temples. Stock characters, including the sharp-as-ever Stanley Tucci as a mastermind tech vigilante and Leslie Manville as a British diplomat out to put out all traces of Citadel, populate the busy scenes playing out in locations across the US, Italy and Spain. The dialogues are at best what Chat GPT would produce — quips, quips, and more quips for no intelligible reason. Citadel could do well to whet mindless big-studio fare appetite (on Prime Video). Who knew the Gal Gadot-starring Red Notice (2021) would be one of the most watched in Netflix history?
But it’s still going to spin the goods for Priyanka Chopra Jonas, because she is the best part of Citadel. In the first few episodes her co-star Madden — a hunk of a man, the kind even the ’80s generation, perhaps, doesn’t care much about — get the bulk of the narrative arc. The story of Nadia, a woman as gutsy, resourceful and alacritous as she is assailable and exposed, unfolds gradually albeit without leading to any engaging or surprising backstory. She is invested and immersive in her role. She looks great. She has decent action stunts. Men punch her and throw her around a lot, and she picks herself up, erupting into badass combat skills when the bad guy calls her “dumb bitch”. She is a natural in Seventh Avenue fare as well as when she bruised and battered, hustling for escape. And she is the first Indian woman to play a lead spy in a big scale Hollywood.
Her future projects, some of which are media-reported not officially announced, are for Hollywood except Farhan Akhtar’s road movie Jee Le Zara alongside Alia Bhat and Katrina Kaif: a romantic comedy Love Again hits American theatres on May 12; in Heads of State, to be directed by the versatile Ilya Naishuller, she’s paired alongside Idris Elba; Ending Things, another action thriller for Amazon Studios; and three biopics of plucky desi women (Kalpana Chawla, Civil Rights lawyer Vanita Gupta and Ma Anand Sheela) are in the works.
Her growth coincides with the fact that Hollywood is serious about diversity.
At a recent Citadel presser, Jonas said, “It takes one leader to make one change, and then you will see, then four and then suddenly it is a community. I saw that community. I started doing this South Asians pre-Oscar party last year. It was smaller but really amazing and this year it was on a much larger scale. …I wanted to be able to showcase to not just the press in Hollywood but to Hollywood as an industry themselves that there is power in numbers. We are not just four or five people you see, we are 400 of us. We come from behind the camera, in front of the camera, we are creators, we come from all parts of the world.” She spells out a historic moment in the entertainment world. Cinematic or any other kind of creative storytelling is imagining more global characters in different racial and cultural settings and mixing them up in big scale as well as indie projects. The hetero-normative is finally dull.
Chopra-Jonas arrived in Hollywood at the right moment and with her willingness to push boundaries in all directions, she is a growing asset in the world’s most influential and omnipresent entertainment industry. It helps that Chopra-Jonas is epitomising elite American wokeness — Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey would be proud — and pouring out struggles of her past with a cadence and candour that could well predict her mission is for the long haul. Her family is the stuff of the kind of salad bowl cosmopolitanism that can embalm the politically-correct sensibility, the aspirational totem pole for the world’s young.
At 41, Priyanka Chopra Jonas is not just fiery red; she is already a native of the millennial Promised Land. India should be proud, no matter what she wears to the Met Gala on coming Monday.
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