For All Mankind Spinoff Casts House of the Dragon Star (and Spider-Man Villain)

Star City, the spinoff of For All Mankind, has its first cast member — Rhys Ifans. The actor known for playing Otto Hightower in House of the Dragon and the Lizard in Spider-Man: No Way Home joins this mysterious new series in an unnamed role, as we still don’t know much about this show. Apple TV+ announced a spinoff of For All Mankind in April of 2024, revealing that it would be about the Soviet space program competing against the American one in this alternate history timeline. According to a report by Variety, Ifans will play the Chief Designer, “the driving force behind the Soviet Space program.”

For All Mankind is a sci-fi drama about an alternate history in which the global space race of the 1960s never really ended. In it, the Soviet Union made a successful moon landing before the U.S. did, but this failure only spurred the U.S. to work harder and advance further in rocketry and space exploration. The show has four seasons, and so far each season has leapt forward ten years in history, extrapolating this alternate timeline.

According to Apple, Star City will go back to the beginning of this divergence — and perhaps even further than that. The official series description calls it “a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race – when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.”

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Ifans has a long list of impressive credits to his name, making him an easy choice for this role. Genre fans will likely know him best for playing Xenophilius Lovegood in the Harry Potter franchise, Dr. Curt Connors in The Amazing Spider-Man, and now the Hand of the King, Otto Hightower. In House of the Dragon, he plays a key role as the advisor to multiple Targaryen kings caught between the ambitions of his House and the threat of dragon fire.

Compared to that, a little space walk should be a peace of cake for Ifans. Star City is in development, but there is no release date yet. For All Mankind Season 5 is also in the works with no release date announced yet. The previous four seasons are streaming now on Apple TV+.