Star City Cast on Playing the Brutal Soviet Space Era

Apple TV+ has quietly built one of the most ambitious alternate-history universes on streaming. For All Mankind asked ‘what if the Soviets won the space race?’ and ran with it across four seasons. Now Star City Apple TV+ takes that same premise and tunnels deeper — not into the rockets or the Moon landings, but into the people living and suffering inside the Soviet machine that made it all possible. Season 1 is streaming now, and the early word is that it’s every bit as tense and emotionally charged as its parent show.

• Star City Apple TV+ drops viewers inside the secretive Soviet space program of the late 1960s, mixing real history with fiction.
• Star City Apple TV+ stars Priya Kansara and Josef Davies describe using costume details to ground their performances emotionally.
• Kansara plays Indian aerospace scientist Lakshmi Chadha, recruited to Star City Apple TV+ for a covert mission to Venus.
• Josef Davies portrays a younger Sergei Nikulov, a character For All Mankind fans already know from Piotr Adamczyk’s later portrayal.

What Star City Actually Is — And Why It Matters

Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Star City Apple TV+ plants the camera inside the secretive Soviet cosmonaut training facility of the same name, a real place that was so classified it didn’t officially exist on Soviet maps for decades. The show’s backdrop is the Venera program, the USSR’s audacious series of missions to Venus — a planet hostile enough to crush and cook any spacecraft that reaches its surface. That’s the kind of historical canvas Star City Apple TV+ is working with: brutal, high-stakes, and stranger than fiction.

What distinguishes this spinoff from a standard prestige drama is its willingness to go to dark places the parent show only glimpsed. Espionage, sabotage, interrogation, torture — the show doesn’t flinch from the uglier mechanics of Soviet institutional life. And because it’s rooted in the same alternate-history timeline as For All Mankind, returning fans get the added pleasure of watching the origins of characters they already thought they knew.

Josef Davies Steps Into Familiar Shoes — and Makes Them His Own

Josef Davies takes on the role of a young Sergei Nikulov, a rocket engineer working at Soviet Ground Control in Star City Apple TV+. It’s a character For All Mankind viewers already know from Piotr Adamczyk’s portrayal — an older Nikulov who rises to become director of Roscosmos and whose complicated relationship with Margo Madison (played by Wrenn Schmidt) leads to some of the parent show’s most consequential plot turns. Davies is essentially filling in the origin story, which is both an opportunity and a genuine creative risk.

‘I was very excited to play a much-loved character which people already know,’ Davies told Space.com. ‘But also to dive into it because this show has its own completely different identity. To be able to play that character that feels familiar but tells a lot more of the story to people who are interested in him and the world he came from.’

That balance — honouring what Adamczyk built while carving out distinct territory — is exactly the kind of challenge that separates a thoughtful performance from a pale imitation. By all accounts, Davies leaned into the physicality of his character to get there. A mechanical watch became a key prop. ‘The watch was a big one for me because it felt like it was mechanical,’ he explained. ‘Everything was about precision and timing and all that. So that helped and it felt like an anchoring. Also my tie. I always liked for it to be a little bit too tight so I could feel it. That helped me get into that space.’

It’s a small detail that says something larger about how Star City Apple TV+ approached authenticity — not through grand gestures but through the accumulation of sensory specifics that actors can hold onto when the scene demands something real.

Star City Apple TV+ Finds Its Emotional Core in an Outsider

While Davies anchors the Soviet institutional side of the story, it’s Priya Kansara’s Lakshmi Chadha who gives Star City Apple TV+ much of its emotional charge. Lakshmi is an Indian aerospace scientist — brilliant, self-possessed, and recruited by Rhys Ifans’ Chief Designer for the high-risk Venera-7 Venus mission. She’s an outsider in every sense: geographically, culturally, and professionally. The show makes no attempt to smooth over that friction, and that tension is precisely where Kansara does her best work.

Kansara, who also voiced Ryan Gosling’s AI spaceship in Project Hail Mary, describes Lakshmi’s defining quality as an unshakeable self-belief that doesn’t require external validation. ‘She never questions her own ability even if the situation is not what was expected or somebody else doesn’t believe in her,’ Kansara said. ‘She really believes in herself. And when presented with a challenge she takes it head on even if it’s terrifying.’

That confidence reads as quietly radical in the context of 1960s Soviet Star City Apple TV+, an environment built on hierarchy, secrecy, and institutional suspicion of outsiders. Lakshmi doesn’t try to disappear into the grey walls around her — quite literally. The costume department gave her wardrobe more colour than her Soviet counterparts specifically to signal her outsider status. ‘Lakshmi naturally had a little bit more color in her clothing because we wanted her to feel and look like an outsider,’ Kansara explained. ‘That was really important in terms of me walking into these bleak spaces. That physical reminder of me being someone who’s from the outside.’

The Sindoor Detail That Grounds Everything

Beyond the costuming, there’s a smaller, more personal detail that Kansara brought to the role: the Sindoor, a red powder worn on the head by married Hindu and South Asian women as a symbol of their marital status. In the context of Star City Apple TV+, it becomes a quiet act of cultural resistance — a piece of Lakshmi’s identity that she refuses to set aside, even inside a system that would prefer she become invisible.

‘I wanted a piece of her that she can’t let go of,’ Kansara said. ‘That’s hugely important. To put that on every day was a real grounding for me.’ It’s the kind of considered character detail that doesn’t announce itself in a scene but accumulates over episodes into something you feel even if you can’t quite articulate why.

Kansara was also candid about the emotional difficulty of inhabiting Lakshmi’s world on Star City Apple TV+. ‘The circumstances are so intense. Just some of the scenarios that are thrown at you, you’re like, ‘I don’t have a relatable thing. This is not like life that we’ve experienced.’ But it was fun to play with that as well.’ That honesty about the limits of personal reference — and the creative work required to bridge that gap — is refreshing. Too often actors in prestige dramas reach for biographical parallels. Kansara’s admission that there aren’t obvious ones, and that the work required imagination rather than memory, speaks well of the show’s ambition.

Where Star City Apple TV+ Fits in Apple’s Streaming Strategy

Apple TV+ has staked a large part of its identity on exactly this kind of prestige, original drama. For All Mankind has never been a mass-audience juggernaut — it’s a cult show with a devoted following that rewards patience and attention. Star City Apple TV+ is a calculated bet that the audience is big enough and engaged enough to support a spinoff with its own distinct voice.

That’s a harder sell than it sounds. Spinoffs that try to clone the original tend to dilute it. The ones that work — Better Call Saul being the obvious benchmark — do so by finding a genuinely different angle on the same world. From everything the cast describes, Star City Apple TV+ is aiming for something closer to the latter: same universe, different texture. Less geopolitical chess, more human cost.

Whether it lands with audiences beyond the For All Mankind faithful remains to be seen. But with Rhys Ifans bringing his particular brand of coiled menace to the Chief Designer role, Kansara delivering a character defined by conviction rather than victimhood, and Davies doing the careful work of building a character audiences will eventually watch fall — there’s real craft here. Star City Apple TV+ looks less like a franchise extension and more like a show that earned its own existence.

Source: Space.com

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