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 & 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 & DK’s desi spies are more inconspicuous. Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Varun Dhawan are Honey and Bunny, a struggling actress 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, 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 & DK. Also, his first all-out actioner. “Before this, I had done psychological sort of 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 of the mindset. Not to smile when I am 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 stunt double to Ajay Devgn in the 90s,” informs DK.
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.”
“She lied there with a drip going and outside we were discussing how to stage the scene,” butts in Raj with a laugh. “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 have said ‘Action!’ and she is jumping off from one place to another.” Varun adds, “I don’t think most actors on set even knew what she was going through.”
Since their second film 99, the 90s era seems to enthral Raj & DK as creators. Their previous show Guns & 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 cellphones in the works of Raj & 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 patch 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,” says DK. “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.”
“We didn’t realise,” says Raj, “But somewhere in our journey cell phones became supporting characters.”