“For All Mankind’s” new spinoff, “Star City,” is a certified hit and another brilliant gem in Apple TV’s imposing crown of science fiction shows that includes “Foundation,” “Silo,” “Pluribus,” and “Invasion.” Viewers finally get to see the Space Race from the Soviet perspective inside the heavily guarded walls of the secret cosmonaut training city.
Created by Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, “Star City” is nearing the midpoint of its 8-episode inaugural season and its dark and enthralling peek within the heart of the USSR’s space program. We chatted with two of its stars, Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Star City’s chilling KGB security commander, Col. Lyudmilla Raskova, and Agnes O’Casey, who portrays her surveillance department protege Irina Morozova (whom we’ve seen as an older woman in “For All Mankind”), to learn more about absorbing the cold atmosphere of 1970s life behind the Iron Curtain.
“I have loved playing someone who’s so eccentric, because she’s got such a lid on things and trying so hard to control everything about herself, that her impulses that do come up are so strong and so left of field at times,” O’Casey tells Space. “Like maybe torturing someone.
“We’re both very lucky with the characters we’ve got to play. The way that Matt and Ben write, we’re just people. It doesn’t feel too gendered. It’s not a big deal that they’re women in their fields. They’re just sort of surviving and ruthless. It’s a really exciting script to get to work on.”
Martin’s transformation into the monstrous KGB surveillance chief and decorated World War II veteran is a remarkable achievement, and the actor is relishing her part.
“I love playing Lyudmilla, she’s an absolute hoot,” Martin reveals before discussing her research process for the role. “I didn’t look at fiction. I think we both kind of read about that period of time, that history. There’s a book we both delved into, which was a sort of verbatim account of people living in the Soviet Union, and that gave you a flavor of what it was like to be a Soviet person. I also read a book about — it wasn’t a gulag, but it was a female prison — and that was a pretty awful book. Mind you, there’s female prisons everywhere, but that wasn’t a very jolly book.”
In terms of costumes helping to achieve an authenticity from which to establish their personas, O’Casey and Martin ponder the questions of wardrobe choices and the necessity of whether or not to break character once the cameras stopped rolling.
“If Irina is completely disembodied, I think she’d like to be in trousers and flats, but she dresses the part and wears her pencil skirts,” O’Casey adds. “She’s not thinking about fashion. Her life is as convenient as it can be. She’s wearing a costume and not thinking about how she looks. We would’ve had a terrible time if we’d stayed in character. We would have crawled home.”
Martin’s crowded schedule of off-screen tasks gave her ample excuses to step away from Lyudmilla’s brutal regimen of torture, and she was not going to wear a skirt!
“I’m too busy doing things like organizing transport for my children, locating their whereabouts, doing online shopping, and seeing if the dog has been walked that day,” she notes. “So I can’t possibly stay in character, and I couldn’t do those things as Lyudmilla. I could, and actually, if I did those things as Lyudmilla, they might be done more efficiently, actually, now thinking on that.
“I really pushed and was insistent that I was not to be in a skirt. And I think at first Matt and Ben were like, ‘Uh, she’s in a skirt.’ She’s not, she’s in trousers. And I fought really hard for that, as did Nicole [Fischnaller], our head of costume. Lyudmilla was a tank commander, I just don’t think she’d be wafting around in a skirt. I wanted her to feel genderless. I had a furry hat at one point that I also fought for. In hindsight, now that I see it on the big screen, I think maybe it was a mistake.”
“Star City” season 1 streams exclusively on Apple TV.