Intrigue lives at Star City, a real-life Soviet cosmonaut training center and the tense setting for this captivating 1969-set spinoff of For All Mankind, the hit alt-history sci-fi drama imagining a world where Russia won the initial space race. For All Mankind creators Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi now roll out the events from a USSR perspective in the espionage-heavy thriller Star City, launching May 29 on Apple TV with two episodes. Watch the video above for our interviews with the creators and cast.
The titular mini town, a grim complex of Brutalist architecture packed with mostly all-new characters (read on for intel on the younger versions of two familiar faces) is a surveillance state where all the apartments are bugged and a team of eavesdroppers listens in on bed-hopping, bickering cosmonauts and their spouses. There are risky space missions in rickety crafts that are brought to life with the same sweat-inducing realism seen on For All Mankind. And there is a mole on base who’s leaking secrets to the Americans. The eventual revelation of who that is will knock you out of your moon boots.
“The thing that separates this show from For All of Mankind more than anything else is the pressure these characters are under from their own government,” says Nedivi. “One of the things that made us want to do this show is that in light of the pressure, how did they find the bravery to still go about these missions, to get on these ships that should not have been going up into space?”
But that’s not all that keeps this feeling distinct from the mothership series – and you don’t have to watch For All Mankind before jumping in. Wolpert says, “We felt compelled to tell the story of this program because of all the amazing things we read about that so many people don’t know the details of because the program was so secretive, but it was important to us that it feel like a different show in its DNA – visually; in sound and music; just every aspect. Our plan is to keep Star City set in the 1970s and not do the same type of time jumps between seasons. There obviously are little Easter eggs.”
Apple TV
The brilliant man in charge of missions is known as the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans). His job is to get cosmonauts to the moon and build a base there, but his true passion is an impossible-sounding secret project that his Kremlin bosses don’t know about and that will make you wonder if he’s a madman.
“What was fascinating was playing a guy who, were he known, would arguably be the most famous person in Russia if not the whole world. And what it would mean to a man — a pioneer, a genius — to have to navigate his passions and yearnings and dreams [in an] oppressive, overbearing state on a daily basis,” Ifans says. “The sacrifices, the trickery, the deceit, the perpetual game of chess one has to play in that world fascinated me as an actor.”
The Spies
The Chief Designer has an uneasy relationship with the compound’s head of surveillance, ominous Col. Lyudmilla Raskova (a chilling Anna Maxwell Martin), who’s trying to identify the mole. “Lyudmilla served in the Second World War. She’s KGB. She’s trying to keep a lid on all the secrets of Star City and make sure the chief designer toes the party line. She is a power player,” Martin says. “We can assume she’s killed a lot of people. She does whatever she needs to do to get on and get by and survive and serve the party.”
Raskova finds a helper, Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey), a fresh-faced recent arrival from Moscow who works in a unit of eavesdroppers listening to the bugged apartments and transcribing what they hear. The Irina that Raskova calls “elite and soft” is far from the cool and ruthless older Irina (Svetlana Efremova) we know from For All Mankind. We see how she got that way as her relationship with Raskova, Martin says, “grows more and more complex over the season. It’s quite toxic.”
Apple TV
“Irina is a low-ranking KGB operative who inveigles her way into Lyudmila’s gaze. She idolizes her and goes on quite the journey by her side,” says O’Casey, who for research turned to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, firsthand accounts from Russia’s Perestroika era. The actor says she drew on “day-to-day lives and wide-ranging opinions.”
The Cosmonauts
One couple Irina listens in on — and who sometimes makes her blush — is star cosmonaut Valya Makarov (Adam Nagaitis) and his wife Tanya Makarova (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), a musician who’s given up a more cosmopolitan life in Moscow to teach at Star City.
“He’s a well-established cosmonaut, which is why we’ve been enticed to live here. He does calculations five, six, seven times because the world is on his shoulders, or I suppose the moon is on his shoulders,” Nagaitis says. “And then it changes as we go on and you find out this pressure on both of them.”
Living at Star City is crushing Tanya’s creative soul. “It’s oppressive for her,” says Serkis. “She’s not a scientist. She’s a different kind of person and it’s this increasing pressure that eventually she just needs to break out of.”
Valya’s cosmonaut comrades include mischievous and dashing Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod) and introverted Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert) who For All Mankind fans know as the first woman to set foot on the moon.
We get a close-up look at that mission from the inside and learn about the true danger and the deadly costs not seen from the American point of view. The group’s training sessions beforehand include a parachuting sequence, but Englert says don’t call her a skydiver: “The plane was maybe two meters off the ground with a lot of pads underneath!” For weightless scenes in space, she tells us, “They had us up on what they officially call ‘wires.’ They would puppeteer us. We both spoke to Garrett Reisman, who’s an astronaut who was really generous and so cool explaining all the realities.” Reisman, who consulted on For All Mankind, is a veteran of space shuttle missions who himself spent time at the real-life Star City.
But it’s not all work for the cosmonauts. McLeod hints, “There’s some kind of forbidden romances, which is always kind of intriguing and fun and dangerous.”
The Engineers
Behind the scenes but with plenty of drama of their own are the Chief Designer’s team. Pulled into his boss’s risky clandestine plan is a young aerospace engineer, Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies). For All Mankind audiences know the older Sergei (Piotr Adamczyk) as the man who put scientific achievement and mission success over politics by secretly collaborating with the U.S. NASA flight director Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) to ensure the docking of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft. He is on a collision course with Irina, who, decades later in For All Mankind, orchestrates his murder.
Davies says shooting in Lithuania, a former Soviet republic, helped him feel the state pressure Sergei was under. “They weren’t liberated that long ago really. To hear some of the locals and some of the crew retelling what their family went through was a big eye opener. It’s a gorgeous place. But to walk around and see these gigantic, oppressive buildings, which actually ended up becoming our set, you felt the ominous presence, even though they’ve done so much work on making it artistic and making it their own again. You could feel the weight of it.”
Joining Sergei on the team is genius Lakshmi Chadha (Priya Kansara). She is brought in by the Chief Designer due to her expertise in a technology that is the finishing touch he needs to put his hush-hush plan into action. Kansara says, “As the show goes along, she’s uncovering more and more truth about just how insane the place that she is working and living is.”
As their boss gets closer to realizing his dream, and Raskova closes in on the mole, the danger factor leaps for the two engineers and everyone else, with Star City going on high alert. “It goes from a 7.5 to an 11 pretty quickly,” Davies says. “It’s stratospheric.”
Watch the video above for the full interview for more behind-the-scenes details; to find out if we’ll see more familiar For All Mankind faces; and how the NASA Artemis 2 moon mission sparked hope in the series creators.
Star City, Series Premiere, Friday, May 29, Apple TV