In this trippy space thriller, cool-headed Swedish astronaut Jo Ericsson (Noomi Rapace) returns to Earth after a freak accident at the international space station, but something at home seems not quite right with her husband, Magnus Taylor (James D’Arcy), and young daughter, Alice (newcomer twins Davina and Rosie Coleman, who deliver a knockout performance). A hint to just how strange Jo’s world gets over Constellation‘s eight episodes as she tries to unravel what happened: Alice’s favorite toy is a plush white rabbit.
“Jo’s used to being practical, and she gets dragged into this really weird reality of trying to figure out what’s going on and if she lost her mind, or if it’s a huge conspiracy or something else,” says Rapace. “Her fight to reunite with her daughter is so painful and beautiful, and I could really relate to it in many ways, being a mother myself. We go to sets in remote places, and we leave our kids somewhere else, and you come back and something has changed. They’ve grown, you look different, you need to reconnect. So even though this is a space job, that’s kind of what we do in smaller doses as actors. There was a lot of connecting tissue between me and Jo.”
Magnus, a teacher and maybe the most supportive husband ever to appear on TV, does his best to help Jo and care for Alice. “I feel like it’s a pretty universal theme of people sort of slightly not quite connecting and not understanding why that’s happening and trying so hard to connect and then somehow it gets worse as a result,” D’Arcy says.
Part of Jo’s investigation involves fictional heroic NASA astronaut and Nobel Prize winner Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), who has a mysterious alter ego, Bud. “I play two different characters, one’s bad, one’s worse,” Banks hints. All Caldera really cares about after the space disaster is retrieving an experiment he sent up with Jo’s colleague, NASA astronaut Paul Lancaster (William Catlett).
“What we’re working on can shift all of humanity,” reveals Catlett, who tells us that when he was shooting the disaster scene, it “wasn’t a stunt double. You’re knocking against the ISS.”
For space show junkies, there are plenty of flashbacks to the accident, plus a spacewalk during which Jo makes a horrific discovery, and a white-knuckle re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. “[We had the] actors on wires or rolling on chairs or rolling on their bellies on some contraption that we’d built,” says executive producer/director Michelle MacLaren of the production, which also shot in Morocco and the vast snowy landscapes of northern Finland. “[They were] miming that they’re floating in Zero G while acting and staying in character. They are amazing. Noomi is a force of nature.”
Check out the video for more from series creator Peter Harness and the cast about their characters.
Constellation, Wednesdays, Apple TV+
