‘Citadel: Honey Bunny’ Star Samantha Breaks Down Her Incredible Chemistry With Varun Dhawan: “I’m Always Cracking Up When He’s Around”

Citadel: Honey Bunny, the latest installment in Prime Video‘s ambitious Citadel franchise, takes viewers back in time to 1990s India. That’s where aspiring actress Honey (Samantha) and her stuntman pal Bunny (Varun Dhawan) embark on a dangerous secret life, working as spies for their shady boss, “Guru” (Kay Kay Menon). Eight years later, their top secret work comes back to haunt them. Honey and her young daughter Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar) find themselves on the run while Bunny and best friend Chacko (Shivankit Singh Parihar) race to find Honey and Nadia first.

Citadel: Honey Bunny comes with all of the high octane action sequences we’ve come to expect from the spy genre. There are gun fights, motorbike chases, sniper shootouts, straight up assassinations, and wildly violent brawls fought to the bitter end. However, what makes Citadel: Honey Bunny shine is something far softer than all this violence. The best part of Citadel: Honey Bunny is the unbearably hot chemistry between series leads Varun Dhawan and Samantha. Specifically in one adorably playful seduction scene smack in the middle of Citadel: Honey Bunny Episode 2 “Talwar.”

When we first meet young Bunny and Honey on a 1992 Bollywood studio set, he’s a successful stuntman and she is about to find herself cast out onto the street. Because Bunny has an admitted “soft spot” for his friend, he offers her some freelance work as a honey trap during a robbery. When Honey learns that her work flirting with the mark was for nothing, as the disc Bunny and his crew was after must be on the guy and not in his hotel room, she volunteers to get the disc herself. When the plan goes awry and Honey is beaten by her target and his associates, Bunny snaps into action to single-handedly save her, revealing he’s way more than just a amiable stuntman. He’s a super spy.

Honey soon finds herself trapped in Bunny’s world, lying low in a safe house until she heals up. One night, Bunny stops by with a surprise: a VHS copy of a film they both worked on. After he laughs at her melodramatic death scene, Bunny begins to give Honey a tutorial in how people die in the real world. The two friends are quickly play-acting death scenes like children until Bunny complains that Honey doesn’t know how to kiss. She demurs that’s just how it’s done in the movies and he huskily points out this isn’t a movie. (Hot!)

This sequence is so charming, so natural, and so sexy that I quite simply have not been able to stop watching it on repeat. The chemistry between Citadel: Honey Bunny‘s stars is at its zenith, something that Samantha herself told Decider was all thanks to Varun Dhawan.

“I think that Varun is a really easy costar. Very, very easy,” Samantha said. “Especially when you have a complicated character to play, you really need an easy costar. And he’s the best. Like he genuinely wants everyone on set to do really well. He’s interested in everyone else’s performance and everybody else shining as well.”

Samantha added that specific Honey Bunny scene owed a lot to Dhawan’s infectious sense of humor, saying, “He’s genuinely very funny!”

“So in that scene, that’s a lot of him and his real personality, so I’m always cracking up when he’s around. So it was easy. It was just…” She giggled.

All six episodes of Citadel: Honey Bunny are now streaming on Prime Video.