In preparing to play ruthless KGB handler Lyudmilla Raskova in new drama Star City, Anna Maxwell Martin looked for inspiration in a rather unexpected place: the suburbs of SoHa.
Apple TV’s alternative history follows what might have happened had the Soviet Union won the space race, and sees Martin play the brutal head of KGB surveillance. But when it came to preparing for the role, she needed to look no further than her Motherland co-star Lucy Punch, and her iconic comedy character Amanda Hughes.
“It’s good fun, playing a really terrible person,” Martin exclusively told Radio Times. “It’s funny – often I would think of Lucy a lot when we were doing Motherland, because Lucy had to play high status, whereas the rest of us didn’t.”
She added: “With [my character] Julie, I could just throw myself in a bush and that was the scene done! And just fluff around lines and make them up. She’s always in a state.
“But when you play really high status – and I remember Lucy going through this sort of pain – you can’t make a line casual. You have to have such specificity, because you’re really holding the line, so you have to be really clear and really specific, and that takes quite a lot of concentration.”
Reflecting for a moment on comparing her co-star to a KGB colonel, she joked: “Lucy’s gonna love that!”
Despite the somewhat unexpected similarities between Colonel Raskova and Amanda Hughes, Star City, which is a spin-off of cult sci-fi hit For All Mankind, is worlds away from anything Martin taken on before – and that’s entirely intentional from her.
“I really don’t want to take a part unless it’s a first time part,” she explained. “In the last few years, I’ve been really lucky to go from Motherland, then Ludwig, which is such a sweet show, and then Until I Kill You, which was pretty intense, and then onto this. I have no wish ever to sort of play the same thing twice.”
She and Rhys Ifans, who plays the shadowy Chief Designer, lead a stellar ensemble cast in the show, which delves into the lives of cosmonauts, engineers, and intelligence officers whose sights are squarely set on the moon and beyond, with the creators plucking astonishing real-life moments from Soviet history, and blending fact with fiction.
Co-creator Ben Nedivi told us: “The more we read about the Soviet program, and how secretive it was, and this city in the middle of the woods that no one could access – the more we read and understood and heard about it, the more we thought there’s something special here.
“It started from that moment, and then suddenly these characters come to life. You realise the Chief Designer [played by Ifans], that’s based on a real person that was also anonymous and maybe historic, was one of the most historically great figures of all time that nobody knows about. So for us, it was an embarrassment of riches in terms of ideas.”
As for how much Star City resembles SoHa, you’ll have to wait to find out…
Star City will premiere on Apple TV+ on Friday 29 May.
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