We were lucky enough to chat with Agnes O’Casey and Anna Maxwell Martin, two of the key players bringing the colder, tenser side of the For All Mankind universe to life in Apple TV’s spinoff series Star City. You can watch the full interview above, with the pair talking through their intense KGB roles, the show’s alt-history angle, and more.
Star City launched with two episodes on May 29, with one new episode arriving weekly every Friday through to July 10.
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Star City Takes For All Mankind Behind the Iron Curtain
The For All Mankind universe has always had a strong “what if?” engine humming beneath it, and Star City pushes that question to a gripping new corner of the space race. This time, the story takes us behind the Iron Curtain, exploring the Soviet side of the alternate-history timeline in which the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. The result is a paranoid thriller built around cosmonauts, engineers, intelligence officers, state secrets, and the human cost of being part of a machine that does not exactly welcome mistakes.
O’Casey plays Irina Morozova, a lower-ranking KGB recruit arriving from Moscow, while Maxwell Martin plays Lyudmilla Raskova, the high-status head of the KGB surveillance unit embedded within the Soviet space program. One is just beginning to understand the system. The other knows exactly how to use it. When these two share the screen… It’s not exactly cosy television.
Anna Maxwell Martin on the Calm Terror of Lyudmilla Raskova
Maxwell Martin’s Lyudmilla is not frightening because she storms into rooms or chews the scenery. Quite the opposite. She is controlled, measured and almost surgical in the way she reads people, with that calmness making her presence all the more unnerving.
Asked about stepping into such a ruthless, high-status role, Maxwell Martin said she found the character fascinating rather than intimidating.
“I don’t find it difficult to play, I don’t think, a high status part like that,” she told Screen Realm. “I find it really fascinating in life, those high status people. I think they’re really interesting studies actually, about how they manipulate a room and gain control.”
There is a real precision to Lyudmilla, and Maxwell Martin said she did look closely at the character’s past while building her. That includes the detail that Lyudmilla had been a tank commander during the Second World War, which is not exactly a small bit of backstory.
“That’s major,” Maxwell Martin said. “How did she get there? What did that mean for her? How has she risen so high in the KGB? So I yeah, I definitely thought about all that stuff, the jigsaw of all that and how that shaped her and influenced her.”
It is the kind of character who feels like she could carry an entire prequel of her own.
Agnes O’Casey on Building Irina From the Ground Up
For O’Casey, the challenge with Irina was slightly different. The character has already appeared in the wider For All Mankind timeline, but Star City meets her much earlier, when she is still finding her place inside a brutal, watchful system.
“I think it’s helpful to know where I’m going,” O’Casey said, while praising Svetlana Efremova, who previously played Irina in For All Mankind. “She’s so brilliant. So, that’s like a joy to watch. And then you kind of have to forget about it because you can’t be on set thinking, you know, and also we’re starting it from such a junior point.”
O’Casey said her early read on Irina changed after speaking with series creators Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. At first, she thought of the character as someone who may have already had a certain confidence and edge, but the creative team helped reframe that starting point.
“I got ideas about Irina that I then had to rewrite,” she said. “I was like, ‘Okay, so is she confident? She sort of has a flare for brutality.’ And then I sat down with Matt and Ben and we kind of completely reconfigured that because there’s such a long way for her to go.”
That long road appears to be one of the big dramatic hooks of Star City. As O’Casey put it, viewers are watching Irina “learn what it is to survive” within an authoritarian regime.
A Paranoid Space-Race Thriller With a Big ‘What If?’ at Its Core
While Star City is built on an alternate-history premise, O’Casey said part of what appealed to her was how grounded the series remains in the real texture of the period.
“The thing I really love about the show is that it is alt-history, but it is also incredibly well researched and incredibly loyal to the time, apart from the fact that the Russians get to the moon first,” she said.
That central twist gives Star City its headline hook, but a major part of the tension comes from the people trapped inside that world: the ones being watched, the ones doing the watching, and those trying to work out how much of themselves they can keep while serving a system built on fear.
Star City is now streaming on Apple TV, with new episodes arriving weekly through July 10.
You can also watch our interview with Star City star Rhys Ifans and series creators Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi below:
Exclusive: Rhys Ifans and Creators Talk ‘Star City,’ Apple TV’s ‘For All Mankind’ Spinoff
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