'For All Mankind's' Costa Ronin on ruling Mars, honoring cosmonaut history, and learning to tie his tie (interview)

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Acclaimed actor Costa Ronin ("The Americans," "Homeland") is another fresh face in Apple TV’s "For All Mankind" season five; his Soviet ex-cosmonaut politician, Leonid "Lenya" Polivanov, has the dubious honor of presiding over Happy Valley as the official governor of Mars.

"The entourage makes the king, right?" Ronin tells Space. "The colony has grown so much, and with any growth of any colony, there’s more to do and more responsibility and more political intrigue."

It can be challenging for an actor to join a show so late into its run, but Ronin has embraced that challenge. "It has been incredible to walk into a show that's been TV royalty for so many years. You walk in on set, and you get to play with your favorite actors, your favorite characters, and favorite world. It's really quite remarkable."

Regarding Polivanov's ultimate allegiances on the Red Planet, the series has made the most of Ronin's instinctive skills to present a mercurial, multidimensional personality who is much craftier than he first appears. Often leveraging his powers at will as Mars is being cut off from aid, even as he’s secretly hoping to become the USSR's next President.

"I approach it as if you imagine a bow and arrow,” explains Ronin on his artistic process. "You know where the shot is going to come from; this is where we meet that character. Then I try to go as far as I can to create as much backstory as possible so that by the time it's day one of filming, I kind of release him into the world and let him make his own decisions.

"I had multiple conversations with the creators of the show and the writers to get an idea of where the character was going and, more importantly, where he's coming from" notes Ronin. "What he says ultimately is dictated by what he thinks, and what he thinks is dictated by what he knows."

That meant homework for Ronin before he could step into the role.

"It was important for me to read those books that he perhaps would have read about the Soviet space program. Because he comes from being a cosmonaut. He does not come from a nepotism environment of political powers. I created a cosmonaut who then later, through his wife’s relationships and ambitious family ties, became a politician, which led him to be the governor of Mars."

Ronin composed his Martian governor role with absolute precision, assembling the character from the inside out and harkening back to his early cosmonaut days. His fashionable wardrobe was selected by costume designer Esther Marquis. until it came to one essential accessory.

"I know how to tie a tie, and there are ten or twenty ways to do it,” he admits. "And the only way I don’t know how to tie a tie is exactly the way they tie it in the show. So I always had to have somebody come do it. "

Beyond his own styling, Ronin also leaned on the prop department to help him get into the character of Polivanov. "There’s a scene in the governor’s office where there were a few things I wanted to have there from his past days as a cosmonaut," Ronin explains. "I wanted him to have two clocks and two watches to know this was the time on Mars, and this was the time in Moscow. So there were little things that may not necessarily be visible to the audience, but I, as a character, knew."

As to how he wrapped his mind around the notion that his Lenya Polivanov was residing on another planet? Ronin felt it wasn’t too tough because he didn’t really get to play outside.

“So I didn’t get to play with zero gravity or any of the elements that space brings into our life," he notes. "To me, the fact that the sets were built with such incredible attention to detail helped tremendously. It didn’t matter if you were in an actual building or in a spaceship because everything was functional. The only thing that spaceship didn’t do was actually fly. Every button had a function and a purpose. We have tremendous consultants, and we were always able to refer to them.

"There's a scene where Celia and I fly in a transport hopper, and we had a conversation with the consultants to make sure this was the actual sequence of how it would happen in real life. These are the buttons that would get us there. So when you are in the pilot’s chair in your scene, you don’t have to think about it because the character would be able to do that in his sleep."

"For All Mankind" season 5 is streaming now exclusively on Apple TV, where you can also find the previous four seasons.

Watch For All Mankind on Apple TV+:
Apple TV+: $12.99/month (7-day free trial)
Apple TV & Peacock Premium: $14.99/month

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Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.