Costa Ronin knows how to slip into skin. You probably recognize him from The Americans, maybe Homeland. Now? He’s wearing a new suit. Literally and metaphorically.
Apple TV’s For All Mankind season five dropped, and Ronin is fresh on set as Leonid “Lenya” Polivanov. He’s a Soviet ex-cosmon turned politician. The guy presides over Happy Valley. He is, for all intents and purposes, the governor of Mars.
Doesn’t sound real, right? It works.
“The entourage makes the king.”
Ronin says growth brings weight. A colony expands, politics thicken. The red dust settles. So does the intrigue.
It’s tough to jump into a show halfway through. But Ronin doesn’t flinch. He calls walking onto set like entering “TV royalty.” He gets to hang with characters he likes. Actors he respects. The world feels lived-in. That helps.
Polivanov is tricky. He’s mercurial. Crafty. You think you see him coming from the left; he hits you from the right. He pulls strings while Mars gets cut off from Earth aid. He’s also secretly hoping to become USSR president. Two balls. In the air. At once.
How does he keep them from dropping?
Backstory.
“I approach it like a bow and arrow,” Ronin says.
You see the release. The trajectory. The character stands right there, where the script begins. Before that? Silence. And invention. He builds a history deep enough to let the guy breathe by day one of shooting. He lets Polivanov decide things. What the man thinks dictates what he says. What he knows dictates what he thinks. Simple. Brutal. Effective.
He didn’t just guess though. Homework required.
Books about the Soviet space program got read. Polivanov isn’t some political nepotism kid. He earned his stripes as a cosmonaut. The politics came later, via a wife’s connections, family ambition, and a ladder climbed too fast. The governor role wasn’t given; it was engineered.
Precision mattered. From the inside out.
Esther Marquis picked the clothes. Sharp stuff. Fashionable, even for a Martian bureaucrat. Except for the tie.
“I know how to tie a tie,” Ronin admits. “Ten ways. Twenty.”
Just not this way. The way the show ties it? Mystery to him. Every day, someone had to come fix it for him.
He leaned on props too. Not for decoration, but for sanity.
In the governor’s office, he requested specific clutter. Two clocks. Two watches. One set for Mars time, one for Moscow. Maybe you don’t see it in the shot. Maybe the camera never pans there. But he knew. Polivanov lived across those time zones. It anchored him.
So what about the planet itself? How do you act like you’re standing on red soil, light years away from home?
Ronin didn’t sweat it. Mostly because he never got to play outside much growing up. Zero gravity is fake here anyway. The sets weren’t.
Attention to detail saves actors. Spaceship buttons worked. Switches did something. Every function had a purpose. If you touched a control, it responded. The only lie was flight.
Take the transport hopper scene with Celia. Ronin didn’t guess which button pushed them upward. He asked. Consultants checked the sequence. Real life rules applied. When the pilot sits down, he doesn’t think about the controls. His hands remember.
Sleepwalking through spaceflight? That’s the goal.
