In Soviet Russia, you don’t watch “Star City,” “Star City” watches you!
Apple TV”s stellar spinoff of “For All Mankind” has blasted off to enthusiastic reviews with its first two episodes and we’re all being indoctrinated into the dehumanizing Cold War oppression and super-secret town near Moscow where cosmonauts and their families lived and worked under intense control.
Rhys Ifans, who plays the stoic Ser Otto Hightower on HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” portrays the Soviet space program’s Chief Designer in “Star City,” a designation left intentionally anonymous due to the notoriously paranoid Russian regime of the era. It’s based on the real-life father of the USSR’s push to the moon, Sergei Korolev, who died in 1966, ending their lunar mission plans. But he’s alive in “Star City’s” alt-history plot.
We connected with Ifans plus “Star City” co-creators and showrunners Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert (“Fargo”) to learn more about the inspirations and production secrets behind this instantly-absorbing 8-episode show.
“It’s always exciting for any actor to play a character that has obstacles,” Ifans tells Space. “Obstacles are wonderful things. Things that make that character’s life difficult are always the most pleasing things to play. In this story, in this world, that’s the case for all the characters.
“From dawn until dusk, every waking moment is about navigating their way safely through a very very hostile environment. And how one does that while keeping one’s own sense of ethics and morality intact, while by necessity sometimes having to behave in ways and make decisions that in a normal world you’d never have to make. Every day is a kind of moral labyrinth for these people. But they get on with it. And I think ultimately the show is a show about resilience.”
Ifans considers the Chief Designer role to be a joyous character to play, and he brings a certain dignity, warmth and keen intelligence to his craft that’s a pleasure to watch in every scene he’s a part of.
“It’s such a unique thing to be, a genius like this who ordinarily would be a national treasure and a hero, but in this case no one even knows not just his name, they don’t even know of his existence. And that goes for the whole of Star City. Everyone working there and all the work that was being done there, none of the larger population had any knowledge of its existence.”
For Nedivi and Wolpert, the element that wasn’t as focused on in “For All Mankind” is the alarming presence of secrecy and intelligence gathering of the surveillance state in Soviet Russia.
“That’s the added element that ‘Star City’ has and that’s something we wanted to be as accurate about as we are with space exploration in ‘For All Mankind,'” Nedivi explains.
“A lot of the contraptions and stuff you see being used on Star City is based on actual spycraft contraptions that were used in that time. That was one of the key elements we wanted to capture here.
“And the fact that the space program for the Soviet Union was their crown jewel. That for them was the thing they were most proud of. And you’d think that pride would mean they’d want that celebrated and the cosmonauts to be celebrated, but really it was quite the opposite. They wanted them even more controlled. They were so worried about their celebrity and success, making them feel like they were bigger than the state, that it put them under even more pressure when they came back to Earth. If ‘For All Mankind’ the danger is in space, in ‘Star City’ it’s on the ground.”
Stylistically, “Star City” nails the darkened mood and iron-fisted environment of life behind the Iron Curtain. The detailed production design was inspired by Cold War flicks like “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Mission: Impossible,” and James Bond movies.
“I’d add ‘The Lives of Others’ and ‘The Conversation,'” notes Ifans. “I do remember watching these great ’70s movies in my father’s lap in a smoke-filled living room in North Wales or the cinema. For me it was any number of paranoid thrillers there seemed to be in the ’70s and early ’80s.”
Wolpert echoes those same sentiments that define the overall immersive authenticity of “Star City.”
“Especially even in the visual approach and the approach to how the show uses sound and the sort of filmmaking of it, we really wanted it to feel like it was one of those paranoid thrillers from the ’70s like ‘The Conversation,’ like ‘The Parallax View,’ or ‘All The President’s Men,'” he adds.
“Those grainy, gritty films. You can feel the film stock and feel the playfulness with the approach to sound that we felt would really put people in that place and time.”
“Star City” streams exclusively on Apple TV each Friday at midnight Pacific Time. through July 10.