anna maxwell martin says Lyudmilla is not the villain she first appears to be in Star City. After an exclusive screening in London, she said the surveillance expert is “a sort of product of this system” and that she “seems like a baddie, but she isn’t.”
“She was just doing her job,” Martin said. “That’s how I view Lyudmilla. She is dedicated to the Soviet Union and to communism. Yes, she’s doing her job very well.” For a series built around a Soviet lead in an alternate moon-race world, that framing gives one of its key characters a political logic instead of a simple moral label.
London screening for Star City
The cast and crew discussed Star City after the London screening, with the project’s creators using the event to spell out how the series fits into the wider For All Mankind universe. Matt Wolpert said the team researched the American programme and the Soviet programme while working on For All Mankind, and said many events in the episodes are based on real things that happened.
Ben Nedivi pointed to the secrecy around the Soviet space programme as part of the appeal, saying the idea of “a city in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere, with no street signs, it’s not on the map” started their obsession with it. That is the business of the show here: not just space travel, but the machinery of control around it.
Lyudmilla and Irina
Anna Maxwell Martin plays Lyudmilla, the surveillance expert, while Agnes O’Casey plays Irina, who unwittingly becomes Lyudmilla’s right-hand woman. O’Casey said she meets Irina “in a completely different stage in her life,” which puts the character relationship on a collision course from the start.
Rhys Ifans plays the unnamed Chief Designer, Alice Englert plays cosmonaut Anastasia, and Nick Murphy directed the first few episodes. Those names matter because Star City is being sold through its ensemble as much as its premise, with the London screening giving the project a public face before viewers see how tightly the Soviet system shapes every character move.
What Star City is building
Star City imagines a world in which the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon, and the series is positioned as part of the For All Mankind expansion rather than a separate experiment. Martin’s read on Lyudmilla makes that setup clearer: in this world, power does not always look heroic, and obedience does not always read as cruelty.
That is the useful takeaway for viewers deciding whether to watch. Star City is not just changing the winner of the moon race; it is using a surveillance officer, a cosmonaut, and a secretive space state to ask how people keep their humanity inside a system built to suppress it.
