The new television drama “Star City” goes behind the Iron Curtain to look at the Soviet perspective of the Cold War space race.
The eight-part series, premiering Friday on Apple TV, is a spin-off of the American sci-fi show “For All Mankind,” which over five seasons explored an alternate retelling of space history in which the Soviet Union first put a man on the moon.
The spin-off stars “House of the Dragon” actor Rhys Ifans as the Chief Designer, who heads the engineers and astronauts at Star City, the former secret training base for astronauts outside Moscow, and “Motherland” actor Anna Maxwell Martin as the head of KGB surveillance tracking their every move.
Ifans told Reuters, “What I wanted to portray was a man who sees very clearly that space changes people, that when people come back, they often come back better people.”
The series, which debuted in 1969 and also stars actors Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Agnes O’Casey, Joseph Davis, and Priya Kansara, follows astronauts, engineers, intelligence officers, and their family members as they all take various risks while working on the Soviet space program, facing great danger not only in space, but on the ground as well.
Show co-creator Matt Wolpert said, “In this world… behind the Iron Curtain… I think a lot of people are unaware of these details. And so, even in the spy thriller part of it, the more authentic it feels, the more dangerous it feels.”
“That’s the way we shot it, the way we used sound, the way we cast the actors… almost no one wore any makeup… so at every level, we tried to keep it as authentic as possible.”
“Star City” hit the screens following NASA’s Artemis II lunar mission, which has renewed the public’s enthusiasm for space exploration.
“It’s a really hot topic right now,” said Davis, who plays a young engineer.
