{"id":342875,"date":"2026-05-30T06:24:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T00:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/?p=342875"},"modified":"2026-05-30T06:24:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T00:54:54","slug":"for-all-mankind-spin-off-star-city-star-and-creators-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/2026\/05\/30\/for-all-mankind-spin-off-star-city-star-and-creators-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"For All Mankind Spin-Off Star City Star and Creators Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em>Star City<\/em> Episodes 1 and a couple of can be found on Apple TV now. Latest episodes shall be released weekly throughout the primary season.<\/em><\/p>\n

While For All Mankind creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi have gotten the alt-history space-race format all the way down to a science since that series debuted on Apple TV in 2019, additionally they felt there was an untapped mine of stories to be told on the opposite side of said race — the Soviet side. Hence, Star City was born, the brand new series from the trio that goes back to the late Sixties to point out what was happening within the titular home of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center while For All Mankind’s Ed Baldwin was tooling around in his Corvette over on the American side.<\/p>\n

It’s protected to say the cosmonauts were not <\/em>speeding around in Corvettes…<\/p>\n

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Flying Soviet Style<\/h2>\n

“The vital thing was that this felt like its own show, not only a companion piece to For All Mankind,” Nedivi recently told me. “This idea allowed that to occur. It has mostly latest characters, its own setting, tone, world, feeling. It looks and sounds different, and I feel for us, that was vital.”<\/p>\n

While For All Mankind just finished its fifth season, jumping ahead to the 2020s within the finale (continuing the show’s seasonal 10-year time-jumps), it has developed its own feel and appear with its sci-fi tech that is grounded in point of fact, if just barely. Mars colonies and manned trips to Saturn are a thing on that show, but over in Star City our characters are riding their rather more primitive — and realistic for the era — spacecraft by the seat of their pants.<\/p>\n

Mars colonies and trips to Saturn are a thing on For All Mankind, but over in Star City our characters are riding their rather more primitive spacecraft by the seat of their pants.\u201c<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Rhys Ifans (House of the Dragon) stars in Star City as a personality everyone refers to as “the Chief Designer” — and indeed, he’s the one calling the shots while shooting men (and girls) on the moon. The actor says the Chief Designer’s driving force in life is “to get to the moon and to get to Venus and to get to space.” Not that the system all the time makes that easy.<\/p>\n

“[He has to make] that occur throughout the constraints and obstacles presented to him by the Soviet state,” says Ifans. “To attain that not necessarily against all odds, but while retaining some sort of ethical and moral fabric — it’s deciding what to jettison when as a way to achieve what one needs to attain.”<\/p>\n

Wolpert adds that that individual level of intrigue — having these characters work in a world where “doing the improper thing or saying the improper thing could have dire consequences” — is one in every of the fundamental the reason why they committed to creating the show.<\/p>\n

“The true Chief Designer [Sergei Korolev<\/a>] was sent to the Gulag earlier in his life for principally no reason, and spent almost a decade there,” says Wolpert. “For somebody like him who has had that have, after which still got here out of that prison camp and resumed working for that very same government that punished him in that way, he has the knowledge of the implications of bending the principles or breaking the principles. And so the incontrovertible fact that he still does that in pursuit of his dream of pushing humanity forward just speaks to the fascinating complexity of that man.”<\/p>\n

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Rhys Ifans as “the Chief Designer”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Ifans points out that while the cosmonauts are occurring very dangerous missions — you will have to look at the show to see among the stuff they pull off — the Chief Designer has also internalized the risks of the job, even when he’s earthbound.<\/p>\n

“In the identical way that each one in every of the cosmonauts knows that once they get right into a capsule of an area vessel, there is a high probability that they will die, the Chief Designer knows that without even getting in one in every of those things, there is a high possibility that he’ll die on the job,” he says. “So in a way, it imbues him with a macabre courage. It’s like, ‘You realize what? I’m probably going to die doing this anyway, so let me take the risks I take.'”<\/p>\n

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