'This is not like life that we’ve experienced' 'Star City' cast on struggling to relate to the brutality of Soviet existence in Apple TV's For All Mankind' spin-off

Apple TV’s "For All Mankind" spinoff series, " Star City ," places viewers directly behind the scenes of the hush-hush Soviet space program community in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to witness all the harrowing missions, love triangles, espionage, sabotage, interrogation, and torture of those turbulent times. And believe us, there’s more than a little truth behind this alternative-history re-enactment. Priya Kansara (who also voiced Ryan Gosling's AI spaceship in "Project Hail Mary") portrays Lakshmi Chadha in the absorbing new series. A gifted Indian aerospace scientist, Chadma, is recruited to Star City for a special, under-the-radar project by Rhys Ifans’ Chief Designer for the risky Venera-7 mission to Venus. Josef Davies plays a younger version of Sergei Nikulov, a rocket engineer working at Soviet Ground Control, a character previously portrayed by Piotr Adamczyk in "For All Mankind." In that series, Nikulov becomes the director of Roscosmos and develops a relationship with Margo Madison ( Wrenn Schmidt ) during the Apollo-Soyuz program that leads to costly secrets shared and a very bad outcome. Both Kansara and Davies both play pivotal roles in the show’s experimental Venera-7 deep space expedition and we spoke to them about crafting their roles. "I was very excited to play a much-loved character which people already know," Davies tells Space. "But also to dive into it because this show has its own completely different identity. …