Episode 3 of the new sci-fi series Star City has just landed on Apple TV, and the drama couldn’t feel more different from the creators’ previous space race hit, For All Mankind.
For one, it’s absolutely terrifying. We’ve been following the Soviet Union’s efforts to get the first woman on the moon in the 1960s, with Anastasia Belicova (Alice Englert) becoming the first to do so. However, it’s at a cost, having taken the place of a comrade who was killed after a false confession.
Elsewhere, the head of the KGB, Lyudmilla (Anna Maxwell Martin), is capable of some hideously violent things. She’s also capable of keeping secrets that could change the foundation of the entire space operation, enlisting Irina (Agnes O’Casey) to do surveillance work for her.
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But it’s The Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) who is the most intriguing, and is simply referred to as… well, The Chief Designer. No first name, no surname. He’s the lynchpin of the entire operation, simultaneously trying to satisfy the KGB regime and advance his crew’s science with some not-so-official experiments.
So why, when even our outright villains have been given a full name, does The Chief Designer remain an enigma? Not only is this by design, but Ifans reveals that he is actually based on a real person.
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“He’s based on a real person, Sergei Korolev, who was the brains behind the Russian space program,” Ifans tells me. “Because he was the brains, he was kept a secret and anonymized by the state, and was referred to as The Chief Designer. Were he to be captured by the Americans, it would be the end, and when he died in real life, it was arguably the end of the Russian space program.
It’s worth pointing out at this stage that Star City is an “alt-history” series, meaning that events we see depicted are not actually how they really happened. Alongside The Chief Designer not being Korolev directly, big historical moments we see throughout episodes have been changed to fit a fictional narrative.
“In the US, he would be a national treasure while he was alive, but that wasn’t the case in the Soviet Union. I was really intrigued by playing someone who was achieving so much — not just for Russia, but for the world at the time.
“As someone so hidden away, it was like playing a living ghost. It was some kind of strange purgatory to inhabit. I was interested in exploring what that might do to someone’s psyche. In some ways, it would be devastating not to get the applause, but in other ways, it left him alone to pursue his passion for space travel.”
It remains to be seen whether The Chief Designer will have more of a fleshed-out personal story or whether his involvement in the series will be strictly science-based.
If Star City gets picked up for as many seasons as For All Mankind, this will be more likely… but if not, the man behind the mechanics may remain an enigma we’ll never get to fully unwrap.
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