Alice Englert spent much of her screen time suspended in midair in Apple TV’s new series “Star City,” playing fictional Soviet cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova, the first woman to land on the moon in an alternate-history space race where the Soviet Union beats the U.S. to the lunar milestone.
Offscreen, she prefers to keep both feet on the ground, ideally in clothes she can “climb a tree in.”
“I feel a lot more comfortable hanging upside down than I do in high heels,” she said ahead of the show’s global release on Friday. The last time she spoke to WWD was when she made her directorial feature debut with “Bad Behavior,” which featured Jennifer Connelly and Ben Whishaw.
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A spin-off series from the creators of “For All Mankind,” “Star City” explores the mythology and secrecy of the Soviet space program, recasting the Cold War-era moon race as “an intimate and tender but also thrilling and technical” thriller.
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Englert described her character as “someone who’s being eclipsed by their own legend,” a woman drafted as an emblem of feminist progress while “completely controlled and puppeteered by men.”
To prepare herself for the show, she navigated through history via Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time,” an award-winning book that chronicled the collapse of Soviet society through personal narratives. Englert also got to speak with real-life astronaut Garrett Reisman about life in orbit.
Physical training was crucial, as Englert did her own stunts, wearing elaborate harness rigs for the zero-gravity scenes. She compared that experience to holding “a very strange Pilates pose in the air.”
Reentry scenes demanded a different kind of control. “When you reemerge on Earth, you are basically a baby again. You are crawling. Gravity comes back with full force,” she said, adding she would exhaust herself with push-ups and then “flop around on the ground a little bit” to find the right level of depletion.
Despite growing up in the entertainment industry, being the daughter of Oscar-winning director Jane Campion, Englert said her relationship to fashion is more grounded than the fictional cosmonaut she is playing. “I love fashion, but I love clothes more. I like it when fashion is a feeling,” she said.
She remembered the best-and-worst-dressed pages in magazines in dentists’ waiting rooms, and the “shame through your body” of prescriptive taste. That conditioning is something she resists. “I feel so dull when I think about trying to do things right,” she added.
Red carpets, for her, carry “a birthday energy.”
“You’re meant to feel fantastic, but you also kind of want to go and cry. And on top of that, it’s actually your job to get over it and try not to fall over,” she said, adding that she often dresses herself for events, even when brands are on hand, because she can “stand in any way I like.”
In terms of top fashion picks, Englert lit up talking about Australian designer Alix Higgins, whose clothes feel “almost like a diary entry. Abstract at first glance, but shockingly comfortable and wearable.”
She’s also a devoted Sandy Liang fan, and owns “a very tiny bag” by the New York designer.
“If I want to feel like that, you know, like a very tiny bag person, that’s the one,” she said, adding that she wore one of Liang’s “ever so slightly pink” short veils when she married composer Cameron McArthur in 2024.
For the “Star City” press junket, she reached into her own archive again, rewearing an Acne Studios piece that she also wore during her wedding ceremony.