Ahead of the upcoming premiere of Star City Season 1, Fangirlish interviewed Alice Englert and Solly McLeod. Englert and McLeod play Anastasia Belikova and Sasha Polivanov, respectively. Both characters are cosmonauts, and their experiences are very different from what we’ve come to expect from the astronauts of For All Mankind. (This new series is a spinoff, which goes back to the beginning—just from the Soviet point of view.) So, we asked Englert and McLeod what they were able to tease about the life of a cosmonaut.
Although plot details remain a closely guarded secret until the series premiere, Englert had this to share: “We can’t tease much except that everything that they do is under surveillance, and they live…with the knowledge of that.” Here, McLeod agreed before Englert added, “there’s no illusion of personal freedom, and there is no personal freedom.” Even so, according to McLeod, “I feel like the cosmonauts can maybe push the boundaries a little bit more than maybe the engineers or some of the other…workers that they have [at Star City]. So…maybe there’s a status…a sense of status in terms of freedom and privileges. But, I mean, it’s not like they have any kind of real autonomy or control over everything.”
The bottom line? Maybe Alice Englert put it best, especially for those of us who have watched For All Mankind and witnessed the many ways things can suddenly go horribly, fatally wrong in space: “It’s pretty much as dangerous to be in space as it is to be on Earth, in Star City….You see that right away in the first episode.”
For the actors, although the work was at times physically demanding—”it was like 10 hours of Pilates a day,” as Solly McLeod put it—Alice Englert said the set itself “was very supportive and collaborative.” Or, as McLeod explained, “we were all very close as a cast as well, which was really nice. It was a lot of trust.” The actors also seemed to have a blast telling us about the dogs their coworkers brought to set. Check out the full interview below for more details on that!
MORE: For more on Star City Season 1, don’t miss our interview with Anna Maxwell Martin and Agnes O’Casey.
Watch our full Solly McLeod & Alice Englert interview here
Catch Solly McLeod and Alice Englert in Star City Season 1. The series premieres Friday, May 29 on Apple TV.
