Star City, the new series from the team behind For All Mankind, imagines a world in which the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon, and the cast and crew gathered in London after an exclusive screening to talk about how they built it. Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays the surveillance expert Lyudmilla, said the character may look like a baddie at first glance, but is really just a loyal worker inside a system that shapes everything she does.
“What interested me is that she is a sort of product of this system that she’s in, so she seems like a baddie, but she isn’t,” Maxwell Martin said. “She was just doing her job.” She added that Lyudmilla is “dedicated to the Soviet Union and to communism,” and said, “Yes, she’s doing her job very well.” The role places her opposite Rhys Ifans, who plays the unnamed Chief Designer, while Agnes O’Casey appears as Irina and Alice Englert plays the cosmonaut Anastasia.
The project was discussed after the London screening by the cast and by Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, the co-creators of the series. Wolpert said that early in the process the team did extensive research into both the American programme and the Soviet program, and said they were fascinated by the stories they found, particularly the way cosmonauts put their lives on the line to push into space. He said many of the events in the episodes are based on real things that happened.
Nedivi said the appeal also came from how little is widely known about the Soviet space programme. He pointed to the secrecy of the system and described the image of a city hidden in the woods, with no street signs and not on the map, as the start of the team’s obsession with the material. The setting gives Star City its edge: it is not just an alternate history, but a world built around the shadowy machinery of state power, where the moon race becomes a fight over ideology, loyalty and control.
Ifans said he was fascinated by the chance to explore how someone survives oppression while trying to keep a sense of moral fibre and humanity, and said what a person must give up or keep changes from one encounter to the next. O’Casey described Irina as a joy to play and said viewers meet her at a completely different stage in her life, while Englert said she thought of the series as a kind of root system, with oppression as the cement and the people pushing through anyway. That mix of pressure and resilience is what gives Star City its shape. The Soviet race to the moon may be the premise, but the story the team is telling is about the cost of living inside the machine that made it possible.
