Last April, we not only found out that For All Mankind was coming back for a fifth season, but that there would be a new spinoff of the show called Star City, which would see the alternate history of where the Soviets were the first to get a man on the moon from the Soviet perspective rather than America’s.
We haven’t heard much more about Star City until now. Today, Variety reported that Rhys Ifans has joined the spinoff, which is officially described as, “a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race—when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.”
Ifans, whose other credits include playing Otto Hightower in House of the Dragon (pictured above), will star as someone called the Chief Designer who, according to Variety’s sources, is “the driving force behind the Soviet Space program.”
Star City comes from For All Mankind creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi. Wolpert and Nedivi are the showrunners. No news yet on when the first season of the spinoff will stream on Apple TV+.
