Star City Season 1 is coming to Apple TV soon! A spinoff of For All Mankind from its award-winning creators Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore, Apple TV’s official synopsis describes the series as “a propulsive paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humankind forward.” Ahead of the series premiere, Fangirlish interviewed Anna Maxwell Martin and Agnes O’Casey, whose characters Lyudmilla Raskova and Irina Morozova (yes, that Irina), respectively, both work on the intelligence side of things. As in, they’re KGB.
O’Casey plays the younger version of Svetlana Efremova’s infamous character, and if we were to describe Anna Maxwell Martin’s Lyudmilla, we’d say she’s everything Irina eventually becomes…and maybe even more. In fact, according to O’Casey, Maxwell Martin’s character “shows [Irina] the lay of the land and the rules of the world.”
Given what we know about Irina, we asked O’Casey how she prepared for playing a character For All Mankind fans are extremely familiar with—did she try to go in as a blank slate, or was it impossible to avoid knowing? “I think it’s important to know the future information, just because it’s exciting to know where you’re going,” O’Casey told us, adding that, in Star City Season 1, Nedivi and Wolpert “started [Irina] from such a sort of…green point [or] perspective. She learns everything.” Throughout the season, “we watch her kind of discover herself. And so, it’s a bit of both—like…taking it in and then…almost having to forget about it.”
On the other hand, Lyudmilla is new to us. Asked what she could tease about her character’s arc, Anna Maxwell Martin joked, “What can I reveal? Well, obviously, nothing—because I’ll be killed.” Which, to be fair, is…also in character. Because in the world of Star City, that’s about accurate. Viewers will learn pretty quickly that Lyudmilla is “ambitious and brutalizing.” And “she’d do anything for her job,” which “is to secure Star City from the enemy, to stop anything being revealed about their most prized—one of the most prized possessions in the Soviet Union, which was their space program…I think she can’t fail in her job because the implications of failing in the Soviet Union are so huge. You know, it means a gulag or worse.”
In our full interview (below), Both actors shared some more broad strokes about how their characters develop in Star City Season 1. At one point, O’Casey mentioned “there’s a tragedy to watching Irina learn what being ambitious in this world will do.” Similarly, Maxwell Martin alluded to “an understanding of how [Lyudmilla] was shaped and how that will, in a small way, be revealed and then closed over again.”
Watch our interview with Agnes O’Casey and Anna Maxwell Martin here
If you missed it, you can also watch the Star City Season 1 trailer here.
Don’t miss Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyudmilla Raskova and Agnes O’Casey as Irina Morozova in Star City! Season 1 premieres Friday, May 29 on Apple TV.
