The Big Picture

The creators discuss the behind-the-scenes of For All Mankind and how they have changed the show’s course along the way. The cast talks about the challenges of their roles, including playing older versions of their characters in Season 4. The creators hint at the possibility of a starship in future seasons and discuss the existence of Star Trek series in the show’s alternate timeline.

[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for the For All Mankind Season 4 finale.]Creators Ronald Moore, Ben Nedivi, and Matt Wolpert brought their acclaimed Apple TV+ series, For All Mankind to its Season 4 conclusion with the thrilling Episode 10, “Perestroika.” Before the finale aired, Collider’s Steve Weintraub hosted an early screening where fans got to see Happy Valley’s rogue techs harness Goldilocks and ensure the Mars colony a thriving future, all on the big screen. Following the sneak-peek jump to 2012, Moore, Nedivi, Wolpert, executive producer Maril Davis, and stars Joel Kinnaman, Krys Marshall, and Wrenn Schmidt joined the stage for an exclusive Q&A.

During this spoiler-filled Q&A, the cast and creatives talk about the behind-the-scenes of their alternate history timeline and progressing into more science fiction this season. Moore, Nedivi, and Wolpert talk about those we lost along the way, changing the course of their For All Mankind road map, those we almost lost in the writers’ room, and maintaining the show’s grounded nature as they venture further into the unknown. They also break down that final shot as we jump ahead on the timeline. Stars Kinnaman, Marshall, and Schmidt discuss the challenges faced in these roles, especially throughout Season 4, the struggle with their characters’ choices (earning the writers a strongly worded email from Marshall’s on Danielle’s behalf), whether we’ll ever see aliens or starships, what Star Trek series exist in the alternate timeline, and tons more. Check it out in the video above, or you can read the full transcript below.

For All Mankind Season 4 also stars Edi Gathegi, Toby Kebbell, Coral Peña, Tyner Rushing, Piotr Adamczyk, C.S. Lee, and Svetlana Efremova.

For All Mankind Exploring the possibilities that might exist if the global space race had continued and where humanity would be now. Release Date November 1, 2019 Creator Ronald D. Moore, Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert Main Genre Sci-Fi Genres Sci-Fi , Drama Rating TV-MA Seasons 4

Read Our ‘For All Mankind’ Season 4 Review

COLLIDER: In what season are we gonna get a starship?

RONALD MOORE: Oh, it’s coming, but we’re not gonna give that away. We need many more seasons out of Apple, so it might be a while.

Related Ronald D. Moore on ‘For All Mankind’ Season 3, Their Seven Year Plan, and If We’ll Ever See a Starship He also talks about the growing popularity of the series and how long it took to create the opening montage in the first episode of Season 3.

Is it possible that For All Mankind is the prequel show to the eventual Star Trek-type show on Apple TV that takes place, like, 100 or 200 years later and this is how we’ve gotten there? Do you see where I’m going with that?

MOORE: I’m happy to announce that Apple has ordered miniseries from all of us! No.

BEN NEDIVI: Thank you, Steve. Keep pushing.

I’m gonna keep going on this. I put on social media that I was gonna be doing this tonight and something that a lot of people kept asking is, and I really mean this, what Star Trek series exists in the For All Mankind universe? I’m actually not joking. A lot of people asked this.

MOORE: Somebody just asked me that recently because I guess there was an episode that just aired, where we said specifically there were three Star Trek shows. I think, and you guys correct me, the last I counted, I thought we were saying it was The Original Series, Star Trek: Phase II, which was the show that never happened in the ‘70s, and then Next Generation, and that was our counting.

MATT WOLPERT: That’s right.

For all of you, how many people would come up to you and talk to you, like a Jeff Bezos or an Elon, or NASA people? This has to be something that all the people who are interested in space travel on this planet are watching. Have you heard from any of these people? Do you hear that they’re watching it?

MARIL DAVIS: I don’t know why Jeff Bezos isn’t coming over to our houses every day and asking.

NEDIVI: Yeah, he sends boxes, though.

WOLPERT: I check my inbox every morning, but there’s no emails from Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk in them. But we have heard that a lot of people at NASA, and we just heard today people at ISA and other space agencies are huge fans of the show, and honestly, it’s really gratifying to hear that they’re enjoying it.

[Spoiler] Was Almost Killed Off Early On

You guys have talked about how you have a six or seven-season plan or an idea, which is what you pitched. Can you give some examples of how the show has taken turns that you didn’t actually expect in that original outline, if at all, or is it all going according to plan?

DAVIS: I will say, it’s weird, from the beginning one thing we all talked about, and I know the guys talked about when they were creating this, was that Ellen was gonna be president. That I was kind of surprised stayed, because sometimes when you’re talking about things in the beginning, things like that kind of fall by the wayside. So, actually, I have to say from the original plans that Matt, Ben, and Ron were talking about, it’s kind of stayed to plan.

WOLPERT: Yeah. It’s interesting, I think a lot of the big moves have stayed pretty much as is. But, for example, I think originally Molly Cobb [Sonya Walger] was slated to die in a fiery plane crash in episode 106, and we were like, “We cannot do this. This is too good a character.” So, there are definitely moments where we adjust when we’re seeing something good is happening.

Was asteroid mining a part of the plan even way back when?

NEDIVI: Yes, it was. Everything was planned when we were kids. We dreamed this crazy show, and it’s amazing. No, I think that road map was really early days, and I think we knew. Gene Kranz [Eric Ladin] gives this speech, actually, in Episode 1 that really lays out that map that we kind of laid out in our minds. We’ve tried to hold to it, but at the same time, we allow ourselves some leeway with what we’re seeing — is it working or not working? But yeah, this season, I think the asteroid belt, reaching these asteroids and mining them, and being able to maneuver them…When we found out what is possible, and even reaching a point now where you’re seeing this happening in our real life, people are really dealing with asteroids, and so it was exciting to finally catch up to what’s happening right now with science. It was definitely one of those seasons that stood out as something we’re looking forward to doing.

JOEL KINNAMAN: Wasn’t NASA celebrating that they just crashed into an asteroid? I thought that was a little underwhelming. They just crashed into it. They could have done a little better than that, right?

Related ‘For All Mankind’ Season 4 Is Racing Towards the ‘Ocean’s 11’ Of Asteroid Heists Joel Kinnaman breaks down Ed Baldwin’s struggles this season, his favorite moments filming the series, and more.

This is actually for the cast: you guys have been with the show since the beginning and I’m curious, how much were you told before it started filming about the ultimate arcs of the characters that you play?

KINNAMAN: Well, it’s pretty close. In our first conversation, we did talk about a five-season arc. I didn’t have a deal for the five-season arc [laughs], but…

MOORE: We were very aware of that.

KINNAMAN: For me, it’s kind of astonishing how much of that initial conversation that we had has actually come into play. There are little things I’m sure that changed, as you mentioned before, but it’s pretty close to that conversation, which is kinda crazy.

KRYS MARSHALL: And I was the exact opposite. I was only slated to do three episodes in Season 1. Yeah, that’s it. You wanna talk about not having a deal in place? And like the little hanger-on that I am, I just hung in there. I clawed my way like Kuz on that asteroid. You can’t get rid of me!

KINNAMAN: They applauded when you were alive. That was good.

WRENN SCHMIDT: I didn’t know where it was going, but it was very clear with Matt, Ben and Ron and Maril. I was like, “I don’t wanna know anything. I’d love to see the scripts when they’re ready.”

‘For All Mankind’ Released Its Stars from Hollywood’s Shackles of Boredom
Image Via Apple TV+

One of the things that I love about each season is you’re progressing in these people’s lives. For the three of you, what is it like getting to play characters where you actually are experiencing their lives, and also with this season playing much older versions and inhabiting that and having to do that?

KINNAMAN: That was the really fascinating acting challenge with this job. It was a little frustrating in Season 1 and 2 because it doesn’t really start to come into play. I felt like in Season 3 you really start to see the aging and it becomes something that you get to start to play with, but then in Season 4, that’s when you really get to the juicy part of it. I knew it was gonna be a bitch, but I didn’t understand that I was gonna have a 1 a.m. call time and then have someone just stabbing in my eye for six hours in the morning, and then have a 13-hour work day for six months. So, that was definitely a challenge.

But it’s really fascinating to get to play these ages, especially in a series because usually when you play this much older, as an actor, it’s usually in an epilogue scene of a movie. But to do it for a whole season, and for seasons of a show, you really get to spend time with the idea of being at that age and what aging is, and what it does to you, what it does to your confidence. It’s fascinating, and it really goes to the core of what I love about what we do when we get to play these different roles, we get to try out these different human leather suits. You get more empathy for people around you, and more understanding because you just spend that much time thinking about it. So, that has been a huge gift with this experience.

SCHMIDT: It was such a privilege to get to play over that period of time, but what was interesting, at least on my end, was this season felt, in a way, like starting over, whereas in the past, it had always been NASA, but NASA at, like, step two or three or four. This year, honestly, when we were starting, I was terrified. I’ve never been so terrified in my career of how do you take on 62 in Russia, speaking Russian, how has she changed? It literally felt like, other than the essential core of who this person was, everything else was different. And trying to figure out how to navigate that over the course of six months, there were just days where it was really hard not to let the actual terror of that take over me. But I also think, in some ways, the fact that there was so much, there was just a certain point at which I was like, “You’ve just got to stop thinking about it and just do every day. Just do.” So, I don’t know, I felt like the first three seasons, in a way, it was about how the relationships had changed and the confidence that comes with rising through the ranks, and this season, I literally was just like, “Holy shit.” [Laughs] I don’t know if you guys felt that, but that’s what I felt this year.

Image via Apple TV+

KINNAMAN: I think you need to continue to take jobs that scare you this much.

MARSHALL: For me, Danielle was always the youngest of the ASCAN group, so in last few seasons she was in her 30s and 40s, and this year she’s in her 50s, so there wasn’t as much of the physicality that Joel and Wrenn had to go through, especially with the makeup and things like that. But what I did find really freeing is that, oh, man, it is tough and also really boring to be an actress in Hollywood and feel like you have to stick with all of those, “Is she skinny? Is she pretty? Does she have fine lines or wrinkles?” All those sorts of things. It’s exciting to play a character who does have lines in her face and does have wisdom in her eyes. It’s fun to have the shackles of that boredom off and just be able to play, and have this woman whose acumen for business and her intellect for science and her inquisitive mind, these are the reasons why she’s in the room, not because she’s youthful or beautiful. So getting to tell Danielle’s story for the last four decades has just been a treat. And like these guys said, it’s not the sort of thing that you come across in television, and it’s just so delicious. What a joy.

Obviously, a lot of us love the way science is depicted in the series and I’m curious, in the writing process, how does it actually work in the writers’ room and coming up with these ideas? Are you sort of doing the story and then working out the science later, or how does this equation work?

DAVIS: How does it work?

WOLPERT: I’m still trying to figure that out, honestly. No, we always try to have a very open, blue skies approach to brainstorming. So, often what we’ll do is we’ll come up with what we think is a really cool and really scientifically accurate idea, and then our advisors will tell us how there are things, like the laws of physics and things like that, that prevent that from happening. But then we have a conversation and things like the duct tape suit come out of that conversation because we were like, “Well, can’t somebody just go out on the surface of the moon and run for a minute?” And then he’s like, “No, they would balloon up in like two seconds and die.” Then we’re like, “Okay, well, then how could they go outside if they don’t have a space suit? If they had to make a suit from stuff in that room?” The fun of this is being creative with people who know a lot more than we do and discovering things as we go.

What I love is watching them figure out how to solve something. For example, in the finale, when they are out on the ship and they’re pulling the yellow and the black thing, talk a little bit about coming up with these dilemmas they have to get through and work out, coming up with the stuff that keeps the audience going.

WOLPERT: Because Ben and I are fairly simple-minded people, really…

NEDIVI: Speak for yourself.

WOLPERT: There’s something about, like, a switch has to be in or out, and there’s all this other complicated stuff around it, but everybody can understand that. But there’s drama in that, or something’s getting closer to the line. So I think we try to build things around complicated situations that brilliant people have to solve, but at their heart, there’s this really dramatic, simple idea behind it.

NEDIVI: What happened this year, which was interesting, the show started in the ‘70s, and our researchers, they were basing things that were developed over real science, whereas, as the show continues, we’re dealing with more theoretical ideas. So we found ourselves many times where, the writers, we argue all the time, but now our tech advisors were arguing with each other, as well, over like, “What could it be?” Because, I think that’s where the show is going. It becomes more science fiction, and I think that challenge is keeping the grounded nature of the show in a world that’s less and less familiar.

Hence, starships. Just saying.

‘For All Mankind’: The Gruesome and the Beautiful of Alt-History Explorers

For each person that wants to answers, over the four seasons what has been the most challenging scene or sequence to pull off in whatever episode, whatever season?

MARSHALL: I’ll go first. The “fuck you” scene in Episode 405 with Danielle and Ed. I don’t know if challenging is the right word, but it was one of those days where I felt like it required every iota of energy in me to do it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Joel is just so much fun to work with. I think that you can’t do this alone. You can try to do it alone, and you’ll be bad at it, but it’s better if you do it together. There’s only so much that you can prepare and rehearse. You do your work at home, but then you have to come into the space and just play with the person who’s across from you, and that day was a long day. It was a taxing day. There were times when I was so tearful the neck of my shirt was wet, and then other times where you just do a version that’s really subtle and muted, and you feel like there’s nothing there. There’s just so many iterations of that scene that could have played and could have lived, and that was really challenging in the best way. I feel really proud of that work that we did that day.

KINNAMAN: That was probably one of my favorite scenes of the season, but definitely not the hardest. To me, it’s hard when it’s not really working, and that was working.

MARSHALL: So what wasn’t working?

KINNAMAN: Who can I throw under the bus? It was challenging to not just yell at everyone all the time because I was just going around spending 18 hours in this, like, silicon coffin. Your face is in a coffin of silicon, and then every second someone is poking you in the eye. Oh my god, if I hadn’t found meditation before the season, it would probably be my last season in my career because I would have done something really bad. It was very hard mentally.

DAVIS: So you’re saying you wanna do it again? You’re saying you’re gonna sign up again?

KINNAMAN: Oh yeah… Yeah. The reality of that just dawned on me.

MOORE: Somewhere out there in the great beyond Michael Dorn is laughing and laughing.

KINNAMAN: He’s sipping a glass of wine in Australia somewhere, so happy.

SCHMIDT: I think it would be a toss-up. The scenes in Episode 6 in the storage room, that was just me by myself with a couple of blank monitors and our crew, so that was both really challenging and also kind of fun to figure out, like, how do you navigate that, so many pages where you’re not actually getting to react to much? [First AD] Brian Relyea was reading with me, so that was both difficult and fun. Then I just feel like the whole Bulgaria shoot of it all. We shot in Bulgaria for three-and-a-half weeks, and I’ve just never had that many scenes back-to-back, back-to-back where it’s just all day, almost every day. So that was really challenging for me. The thing that’s nice, depending on what your preference is, is on our show we have an ensemble so everything’s kind of split. You might have a couple of hard weeks if you’re heavy in that episode, but usually you can take a break, and that was just like a sprint. It was like a nutty, nutty sprint. But it was really, really great that we had Svetlana Efremova on our team, and we had these six incredible crew members that came with us, and then Matt and Ben. It was actually a lot of fun in the end, but still.

MOORE: I would say the most challenging, and one of the most rewarding times on the show, was working out the Season 2 finale because there were so many moving pieces. You had missiles flying, you had the Soviets and the Americans going to the brink of nuclear war, you had people shooting each other on the moon base, you had people running around in duck suits on the moon, Sally Ride’s [Ellen Roe] about to shoot Ed Baldwin in the head on the space shuttle. It was trying to figure out the rhythm of that and the timing of that, both on the page and in editorial. It was very intense and there were a lot of things to keep moving and to make it flow in a dramatic way where you kept holding your breath, and then, “Oh no!” Then something else would happen in getting to what the finale actually was. When it all came together, I just thought it was a beautiful, beautiful piece of television.

DAVIS: It’s kind of hard. When you look at all of the seasons, I always kind of go to the space suits, and the gravity issues. Certainly, in the first few seasons, or couple of seasons, I think that was the most challenging. I think the actors could probably speak more to that about the space suits and their lovely feelings about it.

KINNAMAN: Especially the Season 3 Teletubbies. It was very hard to take each other seriously waltzing around like we’re all a bunch of Teletubbies. [Laughs]

DAVIS: I think the space suits this season, though, Esther [Marquis], our costume designer, created an amazing suit this season. What was interesting about it, kind of to what Ben was saying, is beforehand we always were basing things off of prototypes or things maybe NASA was thinking about but didn’t use, but then this season, it was kind of like, “What are we gonna do?” Because there wasn’t a prototype. So I think Esther created an amazing suit with Matt and Ben’s input, obviously, and I think the actors are probably happier this season.

KINNAMAN: Yeah, Season 1, that was…

MARSHALL: Gruesome. I mean, those suits were 70 pounds. That’s really, really heavy with the boots and helmet. 70 pounds.

KINNAMAN: Poor us.

NEDIVI: Poor actors. Actors really suffer.

WOLPERT: In solidarity, Ben and I wore spacesuits every day that they had to wear spacesuits to set while we were sitting in our director’s chairs.

Related ‘For All Mankind’ Creators Tease Season 4 as the Show Becomes More Science Fiction [Exclusive] Showrunners Ben Nedivi & Matt Wolpert talk mining asteroids, introducing new characters, AI in their alt-history, Season 5, and tons more.

Do you guys wanna touch on anything that was difficult?

NEDIVI: No, we don’t complain. We are living our dream. And that’s what we tell ourselves.

WOLPERT: It’s all been bliss. Total, absolute bliss.

NEDIVI: Every day is a gift.

Where to Spot ‘For All Mankind’ Season 5 Easter Eggs
Image by Collider

I want to talk about the way Season 4 ends. I love that shot of Dev on the surface when it pulls back. That whole thing is A+. Talk a little bit about how long it took to come up with that shot and how you wanted the season to end.

WOLPERT: It was really tricky. There were so many dark things that happened over the course of that episode and so we kind of wanted to end on this note of hopefulness and idealism. Dev [Edi Gathegi] is seeing the fruition of what he and his team worked so hard to bring to reality, but it’s also what Margo talks about in the viewing gallery. That symbolizes the future of the space program, and the fact that they have committed to building out those mining facilities. It’s just a symbol of how much the world is gonna change going forward. So, I think that’s a really exciting possibility for the future of the series.

I want to do a follow-up if you don’t mind. I was studying the mining things on the asteroid. I’ve watched it like three or four times, just that shot, and it looks the best the way we all saw it tonight. Is there anything for fans they should look for in that mining shot with the cranes moving and everything else you’re talking about?

NEDIVI: Ooh, you’re talking about a little Easter egg, aren’t you?

Yeah, I’m just curious if people should look for anything.

NEDIVI: If you wanna look, you can look. There may be something there. I won’t commit to it, but yeah.

WOLPERT: If you squint real hard.

It’s Confirmed – There Will Be No Aliens in ‘For All Mankind’
Image via AppleTV+

If, hypothetically, you are able to get another season, how much is that last shot with those mining things on the asteroid a major thing if you get to continue the show?

NEDIVI: Those flash forwards we do, it’s funny because as much as we plan, “Okay, this is what…” we don’t really know what the next season’s gonna be. So a lot of times we end up having to back into that shot in many ways. But in this way, we did feel we knew a little bit about where we wanted the show to go with that road map, and I think that last shot conveys really what Matt was saying: how amazing it is the road this show has been on and this alt history that we’ve reached a point where this colony of hundreds will now become a colony, potentially, of thousands, and that this asteroid allows that to happen. It allows us to not only colonize Mars but go even further, and I think that’s really the beauty of that shot and the symbolism of what it represents.

KINNAMAN: But where are the aliens?

NEDIVI: Joel has been obsessed with aliens. I’m not kidding you.

WOLPERT: Since day one.

NEDIVI: He comes to set every time, and he’s like, “I mean, is it too early? I feel like it’s…” “Joel, it’s not this show.”

KINNAMAN: “The answer’s no.”

Starship.

KINNAMAN: With aliens in it.

This is a very emotional season filled with ups and downs, and I’m curious what it was like reading those scripts for the first time and seeing what was gonna happen, especially in the finale. I loved hearing the audience. You could hear them reacting to when they saw you survive. Anyway, I’m just curious if you guys could talk about the scripts because the season was fantastic.

MARSHALL: I think part of the really cool concept of jumping ahead in decades each season is that it means that we get to know these folks for a whole lot longer. And I think about that moment in Season 3 when you and I are in the outpost and you’ve been given the command and then it’s taken from you, and then I’ve been given the command. There’s a sort of back and forth, and there is the top text of this command, but beneath that is a subtext of someone who was once the junior and he was a superior. He was the one that I learned from, and now later on we become sort of even Steven. And then later, as you see in Season 4, we become adversaries in many ways. We can’t earn that in normal time. We can’t earn that in a single season. You can’t earn that in six months or in six years. You earn that kind of payoff in this relationship between these two people. And so when we see, in the midst of this riot, Ed and Danielle see one another and there’s this camaraderie of, like, “I don’t care what we’ve been through, the two of us are in peril and we gotta stick together,” you can’t put a name to it. It doesn’t exist in traditional storytelling. That’s been fun and really cool, and I have not seen it done in other TV shows.

SCHMIDT: I feel like again, I’m kind of shit for answering this question because my season was so different from theirs. It was like Margo was in timeout, like timeout, timeout, timeout. But I actually had a realization tonight watching the episode, which was, as Margo’s being led out of NASA, I just thought out of nowhere, “She’s free now. She’s finally free.” I mean, of course, we know she’s going into a cage, but what has been built up for the past three seasons, I just had this moment of relief for her. But I didn’t necessarily see that in the script, I saw it in all of the components of our show coming together — the scripts going all the way to being on set, and then the sound that gets added in. I don’t know, really, I feel like it was the culmination of all of the pieces together.

And total sidebar, Jay [Redd] and Barbara [Genicoff], who do our VFX, are so legitimately incredible, and seeing their work up here, it’s just amazing. The asteroid stuff and the ships? Those two.

I have to ask, at any point when you guys were writing the finale, did someone who was working on it say, “How the F are we gonna film this?”

WOLPERT: The director did. And honestly, as we were writing it, we were like, “How the heck are we gonna pull this off?” And just watching it, I’m like, “How the F did we pull that off?” It’s insane. It’s an insane episode of TV, but it’s great. It’s amazing.

NEDIVI: Now we dread the finales because we know it’s coming. I mean, the build up, like Ron was saying about Season 2, I feel like every finale all the threads of the season come together. I feel like at the end we’re like, “Okay, we’ve gotta bring this together.” Like Wrenn said, it’s interesting, I do feel it’s that moment where everyone comes together, not just the writers, but I feel like the actors, the music, the visual effects — it feels like the entire crew comes together for that finale, in a way, every season. And so, while this was terrifying in many ways when we looked at what we had to finish, I feel like by this season, we feel like, “Okay, we’re gonna get there.”

Obviously, every show is made on a budget, and you have some big moments during the season. How do you figure out where and when you want to deploy the big resources, like the big VFX shots or big action, or whatever it may be, because you have the 10 episodes? How do you decide where and when to deploy those assets?

NEDIVI: Seth Edelstein, you want to stand up? [Laughs]

WOLPERT: Our line producer is a huge, huge part of making this show a reality and is an amazing partner. And it is one of those ongoing discussions of, do we wanna start big and then kinda suck away our dollars for the ending. We always know the ending needs to be big, so I think one of our goals is to try to make each season feel different in the flow of the story. We don’t want everyone to be expecting it in terms of how the epic moments come about.

For the cast, is it fun playing someone that you completely disagree with when they’re doing something, or do you relish when you are getting to play someone that you strongly disagree with?

KINNAMAN: Oh, I love when Ed is a terrible dad. Those were my favorite scenes. [Laughs] And even when he’s a terrible granddad. Oh, I love it. So fun.

MARSHALL: Yeah, it’s frustrating. I mean, Matt and Ben can tell you, I wrote a strongly worded email in Season 3 when Danielle basically says to Will Tyler [Robert Bailey Jr.], like, “Don’t be gay now.” It was awful. It was so awful, and I was so frustrated because I’ve grown to know and love and feel like I am Danielle, and for her to stand against him and reprimand him for coming out, it just infuriated me. I wrote them an email and said, “I’m not gonna do it. This is not what Danielle would do, and you’re wrong, I’m right. So, fix it.” And they were like, “Cool beans. No.” And made me do it anyway, and I am so glad they did because it ended up being really beautiful. Real people sometimes do the wrong thing. They do the wrong thing all the time, and that is what makes her a human being and not just a character on the page. So, yeah, all the time I disagree with Danielle.

SCHMIDT: I think, actually, something that Matt said to me, I can’t remember if we were filming or if it was a meeting, but he was talking about the push-pull of when you get to the place of having worked together for a while and you know you don’t always necessarily see eye-to-eye, but there’s actually sometimes something really interesting that comes from the debate, or that friction of being asked to do something that you don’t think is right. Those are honestly some of my favorite moments in the season. Just to give you guys a little clue as to what I’m referencing, in the elevator when Margo and Sergei’s [Piotr Adamczyk] fingers kind of intertwine, that came from that friction, because I was like, “She’d never risk it all for a snog in the elevator! She would never do it.” And I actually think that that’s one of the most beautiful moments in that relationship because, I don’t know, there was just so much to it and I never would have come up with that on my own. I feel like that was because we had a conversation about some push-pull.

This audience is filled with die-hard fans of the series…

MARSHALL: Hi, mom!

[Laughs] Right.

The Alt-History of ‘For All Mankind’s Alt-History

I’m curious, what do you think superfans of the show would be surprised to learn about the making of the show?

DAVIS: Obviously, that Joel hates being in makeup. I think we’ve learned that.

KINNAMAN: Just prosthetic makeup. The other makeup I love.

WOLPERT: I think it’s sort of back to what I was talking about before with Molly. There are these moments that just come out of these brainstorming sessions, like Gordo [Michael Dorman] and Tracy [Sarah Jones] were a part of the show beyond Season 2 in our original conversations. And actually, in the middle of that season we came up with this concept of, “What if Gordo goes to the moon to get his wife back?” It was this romantic gesture, and that led to this idea of this tragic but insanely romantic death. We did not want to do it in any way because we love those actors and those characters, and we knew that because of what our reaction was it was the right thing to do. There are a lot of scenes that we talked about in the early days of the writers’ room with Gordo and Tracy in this world that, because we came up with this interesting idea that was so powerful, those scenes are now in the ether of the world.

MARSHALL: I was just gonna say, you were asking, Steve, what’s something that folks don’t know, and this is, again, maybe a cheating answer, but I think what folks know, but I think it’s important, is that we all really do enjoy each other. Ron has said many times — I’m gonna mess up this quote, it’s but something to the effect of, “The showrunner is the first among equals,” and that doctrine has bled into every single thing we do for the last six years in making this show. So whether it’s collaboration on set or conversations in fittings, we all really enjoy each other’s company. We really get on well, and I feel like it translates from the room, through the show, into the audience. I see like the folks on the Reddit forums and the conversations, and they have their communities and their connections together, and it just — it feels so kumbaya to say, but it feels like a family, and I think that that’s cool. [To Kinnaman] Don’t you fucking laugh at what I’m saying about our family!

KINNAMAN: It’s like family on Thanksgiving.

MARSHALL: You see I have to deal with?

All episodes of For All Mankind Seasons 1 through 4 are available to stream on Apple TV+.

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